But the difference is...

Yes, there are some similarities in beauty across cultures, but you had to know there would be some differences too. As mentioned in the previous post, it is consistent between cultures that classic beauty prevails over all...but classic beauty itself varies from culture to culture. For example, when you look in the media, what do you see? You see beautiful women from all different cultures being used for a purpose. Media manipulates cultural beauty in a way that benefits their advertising needs.

A study done about women in magazine advertisements looked at the portrayal of two types of women: Asian women, and Caucasian women. While you may not realize it, you probably already know how these types of women are typically portrayed. The Caucasian woman is usually the sensual, sexy type, while the Asian woman is usually the cute, girl next door type (Frith, Shaw, & Cheng, 2005). Now everyone is nodding their heads. Yup, we see this everyday; magazines, TV, movies. The Asian woman is always the nerdy, shy, girl next door, and the Caucasian woman is the blond bomb shell. However it doesn't make one more pretty than the other, they are just different types of beauty. This may be because China has more conservative and Confucian cultural beliefs (Frith et al. 2005). In a way, these beliefs write out the margins for what is beautiful and what is not. So perhaps the views of the country itself define beauty and not each individual person.

Everyone knows that the media portrays what is beautiful, so what if certain "beauty content" doesn't actually make it into the media. In China, the editorial staff is much more strict on what sexually explicit information makes it into the media. A study that looked at Cosmopolitan magazine across cultures, described the tight control the magazine has on the editorial content, and noticed that China's Cosmo had significantly fewer sexually explicit advertisements than Western cultures (Nelson and Paek, 2005). Not only are cultural beliefs influencing what is beautiful, the media is as well.

Neurologically, we're all wired to look for the same things when searching for beauty; the brain is looking for symmetry and simplicity. However we now know the influence that cultural beliefs and cultural media have on our perception of what is beautiful.