Human Beauty Concept

Is There a Universal Concept of Human Beauty?
Slim body, light skin tone and big eyes are generally considered as traits for beautiful male or female. These traits have almost always remained the same, if varied a little, worldwide and throughout the history. People around the world usually deploy a similar set of criteria when judging one's appearance. The way human beauty is defined seems to be fixed and following a certain trend. This essay will support the argument that there is a universal concept of human beauty due to sexual and natural selection, and the widespread effects of globalization.
The concept of human beauty is mainly dependent on sexual and natural selection. From Darwin's Theory of Evolution, weaker species will perish by

Countries affect other countries both culturally and economically. This prevents the localization of the concept of beauty and makes it continue to be universal. Fashion and beauty magazines, especially those that are published internationally, have great impact on the concept of beauty (Yan & Bissell, 2014). For example, these magazines usually depicts ideal woman to be feminine and sexual. As publications and the Internet are more accessible nowadays, the mass media have more effects on the society. People in the world are likely to get persuaded to agree on a unified concept of beauty due to the widespread effects of media. Moreover, international corporations also affects our idea of beauty. The companies, including those in the field of beauty industry, has been shaping how beauty is perceived (Jones, 2010). International corporations try change our thinking of beauty to better suit their marketing strategy. Although localization can happen because of international companies trying to approach the local market, globalization has overall greater effects than localization, because after all, these companies have their own cultural background. It can be seen that globalization has made our concept of beauty unified hence the universal concept of human

However, while depiction of beauty may have minor variations, it generally follows a universal trend. In other words, regardless of what culture one is in, the concept of beauty is still universal. For example, an experiment was conducted on a group of culturally diverse children. The children are asked to choose the prettiest, nicest and bad doll from three dolls consisting of white, black and Latina skin tone. The researchers found that most of the children choose the white doll as the prettiest and the black doll as bad (Pierstorff & Page, 2009). The children can be affected by the mass media so their choice becomes unified. This shows our concept of beauty is largely affected by globalization and is similar despite the cultural differences. Moreover, from the view of sexual and natural selection, the concept of beauty, carried by the genes of our ancestors, are not affected by culture at all. As the genes have long been passed by since the existence of mankind before civilization, the effects of localization can be regarded as negligible. Therefore both globalization and natural selection make the concept of beauty universal, and localization plays little to no role in it.
In conclusion, we can see that there is a universal concept of human beauty and this is caused by sexual and natural selection,