I do have a 22-inch waist, I will say that.
Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.
External beauty is a bizarre thing to me.
Beauty is aspirational - an ideal that mortals approach but seldom attain.
When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free.
I think I can be beautiful with all the little stuff done, and I can be ugly. A lot of attractive actresses can't be ugly.
Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
Beauty is subjective, so people's opinions don't really matter.
Today's beauty ideal, strictly enforced by the media, is a person with the same level of body fat as a paper clip.
Jennifer Aniston is cute, but I wouldn't call her beautiful. I think that is why Cheryl Cole is so popular, because she is just so pretty and the public are starved of gorgeous people. When I was young, everybody on screen was gorgeous.
No matter how irrelevant social class now is, even the most eager egalitarian must be quietly proud that the posh English rose is still an industry standard for peerlessly sophisticated beauty.
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things.
I do worry about the expectation to look a certain way.
The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair Across the tide to see her image there: Then looking up and round the prospect wide, When did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried.
A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
Beauty is variable, ugliness is constant.
It's weird to me to see how different everyone's opinion of beauty is.
I had the impression from reading English literature that British women were great beauties, and I only had seen Julie Christie, and she was gorgeous and sexy. I don't know whether it was just my taste, but when I got to London, I went two years without seeing a truly attractive woman. A lot of near misses.
In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.
Physical beauty is such a strange thing.
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
