A discourse on beauty in the midst of the official season of beauty pageants is perhaps not the wisest choice of topic for a columnist, but whoever said columnists were wise?
The much bandied-about phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is said to mean that each person has his/her own opinion about who or what is beautiful. However, if this were to be taken literally it would mean that could be no true universal representative of beauty, given that at the last count beholders’ eyes would have numbered roughly 13 billion – one pair for each member of the world’s population – give or take several millions to account for those with vision difficulties.
It is widely believed, too, that beauty is defined by symmetry and perfection. This would certainly explain the popularity of cosmetic surgery today, among those who can afford it of course, and the continued production, sale and use of skin bleach creams despite the warnings about how harmful they can be.
Yet there is another school of thought that anything that is perfectly symmetrical cannot be truly beautiful, as it is the quirks of shape and form that catch the beholder’s eye. Therefore, perfectly proportioned faces and/or shapes would be so bland, so boring the ‘eye’ would easily slide over them without noticing them.
Perhaps this would explain the lengths (no pun intended) to which the Padaung tribal women of Thailand also called the ‘Giraffe women” and those of the Ndebele tribe of South Africa go. These women use brass rings to deliberately elongate their necks, starting it on some girls as young as five years old. The Padaung women reportedly never remove their brass neck coils because after years of wear the skin underneath is bruised and discoloured. This practice still continues today.
Then there is the practice that went on for hundreds of years among Chinese women, of tightly binding their feet so that they would not grow because small feet were thought to be beautiful – to their men. Chinese foot binding has since been outlawed.
The Chinese women who had their feet bound, also from childhood, suffered broken bones and painful and smelly feet which were grossly misshapen after the years of binding them and which forced them to walk in small mincing steps.
(Of note, sisters, is the fact that beautiful men are usually born that way and the ones who do not fit into that mould somehow still manage to be admired. More importantly, in men and in women too it is the beauty within that ought to be sought after.)
A study done last September on beauty in the US, though not widely disseminated, found that the things said to be most attractive or beautiful were those which required the least amount of effort. Sadly though, the researchers did not ask their subjects to study human faces, they tested them using patterns of dots, finding they picked the patterns, which closely resembled a prototype, which their minds had been conditioned to recognize.
This has been borne out by recent events in this region. Using simple word association, if someone says Jamaica does your mind not come up with reggae, Bob Marley and Rastafarianism? If not immediately, it will eventually happen and not always in that order.
Last week, Jamaican and other Caribbean media fairly buzzed with the news that for the first time, a Rastafarian, Zahra Redwood, had been chosen to represent that island state at the Miss Universe pageant. Ms Redwood may or may not have been the first of her ilk to have entered a Miss Jamaica pageant, the media did not say, but she will certainly be unique among her competitors in Mexico come May 28.
Regardless of whatever else Miss Jamaica has going for her, without a doubt the focus will be on her hair. Long dreadlocks certainly do not fit the prototype of “universal” beauty, which for years had seemed to and still does sometimes, lean towards the blandness of symmetrical perfection.
There have been a few noticeable exceptions over the years – when “quirks of shape and form” won out. Mpule Kwelagobe of Botswana and Wendy Fitzwilliam of Trinidad and Tobago immediately spring to mind. But even among these women Zahra Redwood would be the quirkiest. If she makes it beyond the introductory stage of the competition, it would certainly be by far the most interesting pageant the world would have seen in a long time.
Ms Redwood said in an interview with the Jamaica Gleaner: “
