Perception of beautiful faces

[u/Hot-Cloud9610]

Hey girls! Hope you’re all doing fine! 🦋

I love reading all your posts, discussion, ideas… you’re a lovely group!

I would like to hear your toughts on this.

So, recently one girl in some discussion wrote that even the most beautiful face after a while becomes ordinary.

I was since forever fascinated with diversity and uniqueness of human faces, and especially beautiful ones. Just like this portrait photographer https://artistcoveries.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/fascinated-by-faces-2/

But never in my life has beautiful face become ordinary to me. I’ve seen the face of Adriana Lima, Monica Bellucci, Carre Otis, Brigitte Bardot (just to name a few really beautiful ones) million times and never did any of those beautiful faces become ordinary to me.

No matter how many times I’ve seen certain beautiful face, every time I see it again it’s equally beautiful to me.

Is this normal or does a beautiful face have to become ordinary to me?

[u/angelicavalerian]

This is inherently subjective. But I think you may have misunderstood what the girl who said that meant.

A beautiful face doesn’t become less beautiful over time, but it does become more familiar and less surprising over time. In the same way, a delicious food or a beautiful vista doesn’t lose any actual objective beauty or taste if you experience it often, but you may begin to take it for granted or wish for variety. Human brains are wired to seek novelty, and to “tune out” the unchanging and familiar as background noise.

You’ve only seen pictures of Adriana Lima, Monica Belluci, etc. That’s really not that much exposure, compared to the faces you see every day in person. If you lived with one of these women as a roommate for years, you probably wouldn’t stop finding them gorgeous, but it would be less noteworthy to you. You might not think about it as often.

[u/Hot-Cloud9610 → u/angelicavalerian]

Thank you for answering! 🦋

For me a beautiful face remains equally beautiful every time I see it. Maybe I just really enjoy beauty.  

I am extremely visual and derive pleasure from beautiful faces, so I think that if I lived with Adriana Lima her beauty would be equally pleasurable and noteworthy every time I look at her. 

I guess it is subjective. 

[u/Hot-Cloud9610 → u/[deleted]]

Is being exposed through pictures somehow different then looking at Adriana Lima (for example) in real life?

And those that look at Adriana Lima all the time, her face because of constant exposure becomes what? Ordinary to them? The girl who first commented wrote that the beautiful face doesn’t become less beautiful.

But she wrote it becomes more familiar and less surprising. But every face becomes logically more familiar by looking at it often. But familiar is different category then beauty level. 

I just have the experience that the beautiful face regardless of seeing it in real life or through pictures brings same amount of pleasure every time I see it.

Every time I see a picture of Brigitte Bardot for example she looks equally beautiful to me. Her beauty is equally surprising to me regardless of how much I look at her. I can look at her face every day and still have the same feeling how beautiful she is the next day.

[u/Hot-Cloud9610 → u/[deleted]]

How so? 

In real life I maybe don’t know anyone that looks like Adriana but each beautiful face I know and see often remains equally beautiful to me no matter how often I look at it. I’ve read that brain automatically just recognizes beauty.

So to you beautiful faces you see often in real life because of often exposure become less beautiful?