Superficially, beauty is aesthetics. We find something to be beautiful if it pleases the eye and gives us pleasure to look at. Specific standards of beauty are also dictated through the media by magazines, television shows, cinema and advertisements. Our culture absorbs these standards into their subconscious and instinctively tries to live by their ideals. Yet these standards are merely details within the history of beauty. Humans innately create a similar ideal of human beauty where those with clear skin, reasonable features and moderate proportions became the paradigm of perfection, the golden ratio becoming a vital part of beauty.

But beauty does not just hold this one superficial meaning. It moves beyond the world of shallow aesthetics and into the world of philosophy and spirituality where it accompanies truth. We see something truthful and it reminds us of an ideal – honesty. Something open and straightforward can be as revelatory as beauty is. Art might not always be aesthetically pleasing but it is always beautiful, because it reveals some truth of the human experience. And to conclude with a quote from John Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”