ABSTRACT
The culture of beauty is everywhere a legitimate art. But the beauty and adornment of the human form, the culture of personal beauty, and, in our age, especially of female beauty, is of the first interest and importance. Many are attractive and magnetic without beauty as it is commonly understood, and some are too useful to provoke criticism; but physical beauty remains one of the sweetest and strongest qualities, and one which can scarcely be too highly valued or too falsely despised. The immortal worth of beauty lies in the universal pleasure it gives. We Western nations, whose characteristics are a small oval face, coloured pink and white, large eyes, prominent nose, and narrow jaw, think the excess of these characteristics to be beauty, and the deviation from them, ugliness. ‘Beauty seems to some people to mean a very pronounced form of whatever type of feature or hue we are most accustomed to; in short, the exaggeration of characteristic peculiarities.
