Show Me, Show You

[thefourthvine]

Last night, I was talking to frostfire_17, and she described someone as "classically gorgeous."

I pointed out that I had no idea what that meant. I wasn't kidding. I really don't. Best Beloved has given up on me on this score; she has instituted a series of rules to keep me from getting attacked by a mob because I accidentally describe a celebrity as, for example, "oddly stretched" when that person is, in fact, the apex of beautiful perfection. (Sample rule: If I think a man looks like any member of the rodent family, he is in fact exceedingly attractive, and I should not share my opinion with others until I am sure they don't have pitchforks.) But I have always had the belief that if I simply looked at enough pictures, I wouldn't have this problem. (I have no problem, for the record, knowing what I mean by gorgeous. But I want to know what other people mean, too.)

Since I had a willing victim right there, last night I asked Frost to name some classically gorgeous people. It went sort of like this (names redacted for reasons that will become clear):

Frostfire: There's always [name of person].
Me, studying the results of a google search: He looks like a man who really wants to sell you expensive real estate, even though he was up all night doing lines off Aaron Sorkin's ass.
Frost: But when he was younger - okay. Never mind. How about [name of other person]?
Me: Seriously? Look at his Wikipedia photo!
Frost: Oh my GOD. Don't use the Wikipedia photos. Go to Google Image search like a normal person.
Me, managing to whine in text: But then there's too many pictures.
Frost, patiently: But I am going to tell you which pictures to look at. Okay, got it? First one, last one on the first row.
Me: ...How can those possibly be the same person?

At that point, I decided to call the experiment on the grounds of keeping Frost from hating me. But I still want to know what other people mean by gorgeous. I've just learned that what I need is for people with functioning Gorgeousness Determination Circuits to let me borrow their brains.

So, this is where you come in! If you have a functioning GDC and some time on your hands, that is. What I want - what I very very much want oh please oh please - is for you to pick out a specific photo of a famous person, one that you think embodies the term "classically gorgeous." (I am avoiding all other kinds of hotness for the moment, on the grounds that I am very easily confused, especially when looking at pictures.) Then post it here, so I do not get distracted by the plethora of images of that person on the internet. (One thing I learned last night: the more famous you are, the more truly awful photos of you there are in the world.)

And please remember to include the name of the person, because it's not like I will ever have a clue otherwise. (This is why I give up on "Post hot pictures!" threads. For one thing, I am never sure what kind of hot the posters mean. For another thing, I never have any idea who the people are, which makes it - confusing. Am I looking at the same person over and over? Or are these all different people? What is going on? Why do the pixels mock me? And then I have to close the tab or start ranting on street corners.)

Comments

[kindkit]

I think the definition of "classically gorgeous" may be more variable or contested than I'd thought, because I'm finding myself in disagreement with many other folks' choices much more often than I'd expected. Not (generally) about the "gorgeous" part, but about the "classically."

[isagel]

My thought exactly. More precisely, I would say that a lot of the people listed here have one or two features that are too prominent for their beauty to fall within the range of classical, such as ears or noses that are strikingly large, or what-have-you. Mind you, some of those people are among the most viscerally attractive to me personally, but I wouldn't call them classically gorgeous.

[kopernik]

Aquiline noses (aka Roman nose) actually were a sign of good breeding for a very long time (probably still are in some quarters) and highly desirable in a mate amongst the upper crust. They were pretty much a hallmark of what used to be considered classic beauty.

[kindkit]

But there's a difference between an aquiline nose and a big nose. I find Adrien Brody beautiful, for example, but he has a big nose and thus is not "classically" beautiful.

[kopernik]

Fair enough. My point (probably poorly expressed) was that from the comments and from personal experience, a lot of people think that all prominent features, including, uh, let's say distinctive noses, would preclude classical beauty, but that wasn't always the case. Not all big noses are created alike. Well-formed but big could have been more than acceptable, depending on the times. But a big blob of doughy matter in the middle of someone's face, no, that would not be classically beautiful. Ever.

Like a lot of things, classic beauty tends to dwell in "I know it when I see it" territory. There's a BIG difference in my mind between what's beautiful and what's classically beautiful. As other people have said, ancient Roman and especially Grecian art come to life is about the best way to describe it, for me.

[risha]

+1. I agree that Alan Rickman and Josephine Baker are gorgeous, for instance, but neither would fall into my mental picture of "classic"ally so.

[innocentsmith]

Yeah, even all the votes for Audrey Hepburn...I adore her and would probably put her in my Top Ten Most Gorgeous Women of All Time list. But one of the reasons why she's such a big name is that her look is distinctive. She's kind of the archetypical gamine beauty - wide-eyed, strikingly thin and childlike and a little unearthly - which for me is a different category from "classical" beauty.