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posted by on Monday March 20 2017, @10:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-very-concept-of-beauty-is-part-of-the-entrenched-patriarchy dept.

For over a year, I worked as a beauty editor, writing and researching about the products, trends, and people that make us want to look a certain way. And as research for many of the stories I wrote, I consulted with dermatologists, plastic surgeons, makeup artists, aestheticians, and more trying to answer a simple question—how can I make myself more conventionally attractive?

"Beauty is confidence," they'd always say, prefacing the real answer. Inevitably, these experts would eventually tell me that you feel more confident, and thus more beautiful, when you look blemish- and wrinkle-free. (Pending on the product they were promoting, this could also incorporate being tanner, or more contoured, or thinner, or paler, or less made up, or curvier, etc.) Regardless of respondents' different aesthetic tastes, everyone seemed to agree—younger is more beautiful. Beauty was about anti-aging.

Naturally, the problem here is the premise. What is beauty beyond someone else defining it? For as long as humanity's obsession with the term has existed, we've equally known about its subjective nature. After all, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is merely a cliché that posits that exact subjectivity of attractiveness.

But what if the beholder can eliminate subjectivity—what if the beholder wasn't a person, but an algorithm? Using machine learning to define beauty could, theoretically, make beauty pageants and rankings like People's annual Most Beautiful in the World list more objective and less prone to human error. Of course, teaching an algorithm to do anything may involve some bias from whoever does the programming, but that hasn't stopped this automated approach from defining equally subjective things like listening preferences or news value (we see you, Facebook et al).

Source:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/when-beauty-is-in-the-eye-of-the-robobeholder/


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:34AM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:34AM (#481937) Journal

    I'll repeat my old claim here:

    If women were convinced that moon dust (or Mars dust) could make them look younger, we would already have a colony on the moon (or Mars) extracting those beneficial dust particles. Mary Kay and Avon would each have financed their own colonies. Oh - Cover Girl. And, probably a dozen others.

    Scam artists are a dime a dozen, anywhere you go, but none of them has yet tried to sell moon dust, or any other "rare" item from the moon.

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  • (Score: 1) by Soylentbob on Tuesday March 21 2017, @07:19AM

    by Soylentbob (6519) on Tuesday March 21 2017, @07:19AM (#481996)

    If women were convinced that moon dust (or Mars dust) could make them look younger

    Problem is, everyone knows that those dusts don't work. But we should raise the awareness to the fact that CO2 and especially methane in the atmosphere accelerates the ageing process. (Global warming should be solved by no-time then...) Oh, and mental exercises obviously increase the blood circulation and nutrition of the head, which causes a significant reduction of wrinkles and more vital skin colour. (Ok, that should take care of the educational crisis. Wait, maybe we should have kept that as a last, it might counteract to the effectiveness of this scheme for other schemes...)