By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

LOOKS, some people say, is nature’s way of giving you a good hand. Excellent genes help, but are no guarantee. What if you have some recessive genes that suddenly decide to make an appearance three generations later? Which explains how two people of normal height can sometimes be blessed with a midget child.

Being born to wealth might give you an edge when you decide on cosmetic surgery later, but good looks are never a monopoly of the rich. In fact, a sociologist friend once pointed out, the reason beauty pageants are so popular among the urban poor is that they consider good looks a singular blessing, a sort of sign from above that they’ve been given a rare opportunity to better their lot so they should go hop to it. If you can’t engineer good looks and they suddenly land on your lap via a fair and tawny-headed daughter, doesn’t that say that the gods have smiled on you at last, and your luck just might change for the better? Why not expose the girl then to beauty pageants where any number of rich unattached guys might be on the panel of judges and on the prowl for their girl de jour?

Again, says this sociologist friend, it’s not only the colonial mindset that makes fair skin and skin whitening creams a winner. It’s aspirational. Among the poor, fair skin unblemished by insect bites, wounds and scars is kutis-mayaman, the skin of the privileged lot, and isn’t that what most people aspire to be?

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

LOOKING in, the trouble with beauty is that its very idea is impossible to define; it is relative and self-evident, timeless and fleeting, why she even walks in it, according to Cummings. A bigger puzzle is how people can be in such agreement (celebrities) and conflict (beauty pageants) about it. So is it really within? Why then do we spend so much time working on and being obsessed with the without part?

Additionally, what women and men see as beautiful is apparently not in harmony, perhaps has never been. Additionally, individual “taste” has been much maligned, heck, even ridiculed, often ironically, by whomever they’re dating at the moment.

Putting aside the fact that personalities are not usually immediately quantifiable, then the eyes have it. I don’t mean we look at how the eyes fit with the rest of the face, or even the rest of the person. No, I mean the eyes by themselves.

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