Beauty, Schönheit, beauté, belezza and so on. It is not only so that all countries have a different word for beauty, almost all of them have a different beauty ideal as well. For us people in the Netherlands living in a multicultural society, it is already quite clear by simply looking around that there is huge difference in beauty ideals due to, for example, different backgrounds, different native country, religion, etcetera. A beauty ideal is, as we see it nowadays, the appearance of a (fe)male in a particular society/ part of the world. Mostly women strive to achieve and maintain a beauty ideal. Nowadays physical attractiveness is often more important than intelligence or achievements. In this research paper, the focus will be put on women …show more content…
Furthermore, we will study the definition of a body image and what the causes are for developing a negative body image. In this part also the influence of the media will be taken into account. However, before these things can be discussed it has to be clear if there are certain aspects or characteristics that belong to every beauty ideal around the world and how we learn what is pretty and what is not. Afterwards the beauty ideals of Brazil, Thailand and the western world will be compared. We particularly chose three places from different continents and chose the western world as one subject. The reason why we combined all western countries was because within the western world the beauty ideals are very similar, but there are some small differences present. In our opinion it was more interesting to combine all those countries. To support all the information given in the research papers we used as many scientific experiments and articles as possible. Is there a universal beauty …show more content…
In this study subjects from thirteen different countries were asked to rank an assortment of pictures from ugliest to prettiest. All those subjects had in common that the pictures with people who were most symmetrical were considered to be the prettiest, thus it can be said that the rate of symmetry is a good way of rating beauty. This phenomenon is not only common among humans but also among several types of animals. There are animals (the female swallows) who also prefer symmetry. Some scientist believe that having more symmetry coincides with having a stronger immune system, which will give the offspring better genes and thus is more likely to survive. So this means that it is in our instinct to look for symmetry, while we want to have offspring that is healthy and strong. This is also why we look for friends who have the same amount of attractiveness and have a lot of similarities with ourselves. So we do not only look for symmetry in someone’s face, but also that we look for symmetry among each other. We want to have a lot of similarities with the other person, so that we can relate to each