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

[sapote]

It's sometimes worth poking at the idea that "classical" often is meant on some level to mean the same thing as "classical studies" does in history - that is, vaguely to do with Ancient Greece. In general, people who are described as "classically beautiful" often resemble a certain school of sculpture that draws heavily on Greek sculpture as filtered through the Renaissance. The features aren't just Caucasian (though they're often very pointedly Caucasian), they follow extremely specific proportions, which are probably honestly written down somewhere as Ideal Face Proportions For Statues. ... I live in a place with a lot of statuary and before a certain era every single statue has the same nose, this is why I started wondering.

[marina]

I was going to say that for me, growing up, "classical" beauty was definitely drawn from Greek sculptures, but I saw that everyone else in the comments was using B&W Hollywood films for their reference of "classical", so I assumed it was just a cultural difference.

The thing about those proportions though, is that aside from being pointedly Caucasian, they are not applied, by most people, to anyone who isn't white IRL. There are lots of people who fit those specific requirements for facial features but are not white, and yet it's not likely they'll be referred to as "classically beautiful" in broad public discourse. January Jones, on the other hand, will be compared to a "classic beauty" in 0.5 seconds.

[sapote]

Well, exactly, for that definition ("resembles a Greek sculpture made by Europeans in a certain era") the Venn diagram of classically beautiful people would probably look like a donut, with "from a certain ethnic background" as the dough and "classical facial proportions" as the donut hole. I'm curious as to whether the definition is that privative in everyday usage, though.

[marina]

Maybe it's because I'm from a place where doughnuts are extremely uncommon, but I'm not sure I follow? I was just saying that there are non-white people whose features fit the "classical" Greek ideals, but in everyday life they're still extremely unlikely to be called "classically" gorgeous in most Western countries.

[sapote]

I was debating posting again with an ETA apologizing for running on without good reading comprehension: your point is taken.

[laurajv]

I was going to say that for me, growing up, "classical" beauty was definitely drawn from Greek sculptures, but I saw that everyone else in the comments was using B&W Hollywood films for their reference of "classical", so I assumed it was just a cultural difference.

I agree with you on the Greek sculpture thing, and admit to being somewhat flummoxed by some of the choices people are presenting. (I did a little photoillustration over in the lj version of the post.)

But you are very right that someone's mere non-whiteness often means that (especially white) people will not include them in the "classically gorgeous" category. (The notable exception being Halle Berry, who is so outstandingly classically beautiful that Greek statues weep in despair.)

[ratcreature]

I've never read a book about making sculptures, but as far as books about drawing go, there are in fact diagrams for ideal facial proportions in pretty much every book teaching you how to draw. Diagrams like this one from 1509:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Divina_proportione.png
explaining to you how to follow the golden ratio as it applies to heads.

Not coincidentally none of the popular art instruction books that get recommended again and again to this day show you any non-white example humans, probably because they are all from pre-1930 and get reprinted and referred to constantly, because they offer good instruction on the technical side. The only figure drawing book I've encountered that is more diverse makes up for it by using racist "anthropological" skull classification and body types, without examining the origin of the classification at all but pretends these terms were neutral and still considered scientific even though it is from the 1990s not the 1890s.