Where do Beauty Trends come from?

4-inch lotus feet. Lead-based face makeup. Hairlines plucked to create a longer forehead. Though these may sound like acts from the Circus of Beauty Shop of Horrors, they were all considered common beauty rituals at some point in history. So then just what, you ask, is beautiful?

Dictionary.com defines beautiful as having qualities that give great pleasure or satisfaction to see, hear or think about. Sounds simple enough, but that vague explanation doesn't tell us what physical beautify really is, and it certainly doesn't account for the passing beauty trends have followed (and at times I would have to say stalked, hunted down and maimed) people throughout history.
When Beauty Becomes Hazardous to Your Health

If you'd been born a woman in Ancient China, chances are your forefront foot bones would have been broken, bent and then tied into place, so that over time your feet would have stopped growing and morphed into a dainty 4-inch lotus-like appendages. Foot binding was a custom practised on young females in , beginning in the 10th century and ending in the early 20th century.

Think that's scary? During the Elizabethan era, upper-class women covered their skin with Lead-based makeup, often resting in peripheral neuropathy, gout, anemia, chronic renal failure, and disfiguring scarring. Can you say toxic? The same women also plucked their frontal hairs to lengthen the size of their forehead because, you guessed it, and high foreheads were a turn on.

Beauty trends have come and gone, although, sometimes to our dismay, certain trends have crept back in again. Take Twiggy. As thin as a stick, hence her name, Twiggy would have been considered an anomaly in the age of antiquity, when women were round and supple. But in the 60s, her ultra-thin frame was all the rage. Society finally frowned upon skin and bones, so women put a little meat on their frames until the 90s, when heroin-chic took over and the emaciated look became popular once again.


Where do Beauty Trends come from?

Ginger Garrett, author of Beauty Secrets of the Bible, believes religion has played a key role in setting beauty trends throughout history.

Ancient Greeks and Romans mixed religion and body image with sex. "When husbands went to church, they had sex with the temple prostitute; for them sex was so much at the forefront of the culture and religion and their gods and goddesses had beautiful bodies," says Garrett. In these times, the focus of beauty was more on the males than the females, as women were rarely encouraged to speak. "Men were supposed to have muscles, and be powerful, like their gods. Women's ideal shape was heavier than our idea type today, but not obese. It was a very natural standard, with generous hips and belly and relatively small breasts compared to our ideal."

Christianity caught on, explains Garrett, and suddenly society stopped celebrating the body and began covering it up. A movement called the Gnostics, which taught a hatred of the body, followed. The Greek/Roman worship rituals and their focus on the body was considered evil by the Gnostics, and so they began to teach that everything physical was evil and that beauty was sin. At this time, women were considered child bearers, and wide hips and curves were thought to be attractive on a female because they denoted fertility.

If what Garrett writes about is true, then it appears that Hollywood is the Religion of choice these days. What people see in the tabloids or on the big screen, from Ashley Simpson's new nose to Nicole Rich's skeletal frame, unarguably influence a person's own sense of self when he or she looks in the mirror. And unless you live in a cave, it's impossible not to notice that most actresses who achieve overnight stardom slim down before their first awards ceremony, then land a cover spread on Maxim or People so the rest of the world can read about their extreme makeover. And as long as Briny Spears and Paris Hilton are considered more "newsworthy" than the war in Iraq, Hollywood will continue to set the beauty standard for the rest of us common folks, regardless of how unrealistic that standard may be.

But isn't there something more . . .

While few would argue that society and religion have been influential when it comes to defining beautiful, neither tells us why millions of people from varying cultures or religions find Brad Pitt (or Jessica Alba, or you insert the star) attractive. The answer might be found in the form of a mathematical ratio.