Science suggests that beauty is subjective

A study led by Laura Germine, a psychiatric researcher, investigated perceptions of physical attractiveness. ^[1]Participants, which included 547 sets of identical twins and 214 sets of fraternal twins, were instructed to look at pictures of faces. They then rated the faces based on attractiveness and devised individual scores that measured the degree to which each twin’s individual rating differed from the average rating of the entire collective set of twins. Germine and other researchers found that participants disagreed on the attractiveness of a face 52% of the time. Given that results show that participants had differing judgements more than agreeing ones, we have reason to believe that beauty is subjective. The mere fact that the results do not demonstrate a uniform judgement on the part of the participants suggests that universal aesthetic judgements are less likely to be attained. What’s more, researchers found that the basis of this disagreement lies in the person’s environment, which has a strong influence on who they find attractive. This conclusion was reached since the preferences of identical twins’, who share identical DNA, were not more similar to each other than fraternal twins.^[2] The environment includes things such as friendship groups and social media usages and this is unique even for twins. So, beauty is in the eye of the beholder because an individual’s environment, which is unique and varies among all people, greatly affects and shapes their aesthetic taste.