There ain’t much between her ears…
Wow. The degree of judgment is amazing. We have had our heads turned around completely.
There are a fair percentage of the people who have been named who do not appeal to ME personally, but I certainly understand why someone with different taste than mine would feel differently. I can see it even when I don’t personally share the feeling.
The one that bugs the crap outta me though is the SJP stuff… god. She’s very attractive, and I am completely at a loss as to why so many people don’t see it, even if they don’t see it for their own taste.
Another one that irritated the crap outta me was the trashing of Monica Lewinsky as so hopelessly icky. No she wasn’t/isn’t - she was a very attractive girl that was varying degrees of chubby. But her face was great; great skin, teeth, lips, terrific eyes, fantastic hair. (If we are going to discuss WHO people are, that’s different, I’m on pure aesthetics) And if you can appreciate chubby at all, she was bouncy and shapely. It drove me nuts the way people referred to her as ugly.
Funnily enough, the types I find hardest to appreciate are the ones who are sort of universally considered classically pretty or handsome, usually blondes. So many of them really just turn into a boring blur- yeah, not ugly but so utterly generic who cares?
Googling hot celebrities yields:
Faith Hill
And when it comes to men, the perfect example is David Beckham - I don’t think it’s possible for someone to be less interestingly “perfect”. I’m not kidding when I say I find him genuinely repellant in his generic blonde perfection.
In order for me to respond to beauty, the very first thing I need is something genuinely distinctive. I need to be able to recognize someone in a crowd in order to respond to their looks.
For instance, I used to debate with a friend of mine about Britney Spears vs. Jessica Simpson. (The young, fit, perfectly made up and shot versions for this discussion). I think Simpson without makeup and a little chubby kicks Britney around the block on her very best day. Britney on her best day is utterly boring. Not only is Jessica particularly pretty in every respect, but what puts her over the top is the nose! It’s FABULOUS…and it’s what takes her from “yeah, so what” to “damn, that girl is pretty!”
(And it is fortunate for Jessica that she was blessed with a naturally stunning figure. As was Selma Heyak. The two of them are like something out of a fantasy comic book.)
Well, it’s all in who you’re comparing to, right? In her case, the logical comparisons were to Cindy McCain, and to a lesser extent to Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. And out of those four, Michelle Obama is, indeed, the most attractive: Sarah Palin looks molded out of plastic, Cindy McCain looks like something you’d feed live mice to, and Hillary Clinton, even to the extent that she was once attractive, the years and stress have not been kind to her.
Gwenyth Paltrow. I have the constant impression that she’s just an old old lady who had stolen the skin off a younger one but is wearing it improperly
Natalie Portman. Maybe I’m just too old to see it.
Julia Roberts. Really? People think she’s beautiful/sexy/whatever?
Cameron Diaz. I’m sorry. I have nothing against her, but she is simply not good-looking. In fact, she’s ugly.
Uma Thurman. See above.
Sela Ward. OK, her time in the limelight has come and gone, but for a while t here everyone was raving about how sexy she was.
Liv Tyler. The poor girl looks brain-damaged. Was she dropped on her head as a baby?
Sharon Stone. She looks like a housewife from Greenwich, Connecticut.
Pamela Anderson. But I don’t think of her as real – more like an animated Barbie doll.
Angelina Jolie. Don’t get it.
Scarlett Johansson. She looks like a really sensitive, emotional, self-involved college girl who writes bad poetry. Most definitely not my type.
Nicole Kidman. Fantastically pretty, but an absolute zero on the sexual magnetism scale.
That…that is simple madness.
I see what you’re saying, but in Michelle’s case, people are still saying it, so I don’t think it’s so much about the comparison thing any more. I do think she’s a fine, put together lady, but her face kind of scares me. And as much as I dislike Sarah Palin (and that is a *lot *of dislike )I do think she has a pretty face and nice figure.
Henry Rollins does.
I don’t like Sarah Palin one bit… but I think it’s really hard to argue that she’s not attractive in a plastic beauty queen way.
As for Michelle… i think she’d look fantastic if her damn eyebrows weren’t so creepy.
Here is why Sarah Jessica Parker is so universally considered to be unattractive: she has a large, hooked nose, and a face with somewhat “masculine” lines.
A large hooked nose of the type that Parker has is virtually never considered an attractive feature for women. The ideal female nose - reflected not only in today’s female beauties but in pretty much all art, throughout history - is fine and delicate.
The nose doesn’t matter so much with men - particularly if it’s offset by a prominent chin, a heavy brow, or “rugged” features. There are many leading men with large or oddly shaped noses. Tom Cruise’s nose is rather large, compared to most men, but that sure as hell didn’t hinder his career. Owen Wilson’s nose was broken as a youth on the football field; Billy Campbell’s, as a rugby player; both of those men have large female followings despite their caved-in noses. Adrien Brody’s nose is downright enormous but I have heard women call him gorgeous, time and time again.
But I don’t know of anyone who finds a big or weirdly-shaped nose to be attractive on a woman. Anyone.
Add to that the fact that SJP’s face is, for lack of a better word, manly-looking. She bears an alarming resemblance to Roger Daltrey of The Who, actually. The lines of her face are angular and not feminine looking.
What can I say? A lot of people say “oh, she’s ugly,” but I’m trying to actually analyze and deconstruct the characteristics that would make people say that, and when this is done, it isn’t illogical at all. Her face simply is not the traditional standard of “pretty” nor is it “unconventionally pretty,” like, say, Allyson Hannigan might be called. A woman with a slight overbite, somewhat large teeth, a high forehead, giant lips like Angelina Jolie, might be considered “unconventionally sexy” - but a big honkin’ nose like SJP’s is nearly always a dealbreaker.
There’s a reason why the nose-job industry is so profitable, and it’s not because there are thousands of MEN who want smaller noses.
Well, thanks Argent, but I did understand that. I just think it’s ridiculous.
But what’s so ridiculous about it exactly?
I realize there are a few men out there who either find the big nose and manly jaw attractive, or simply don’t care about it because they’re more attracted to other attributes (eyes, skin, hair, the way a woman walks or the way she laughs, etc - it could be anything.) But for most guys, a big nose on a woman just isn’t considered pretty. That’s how it is.
And I consider it ridiculous for the same reason I think saying Monica Lewinsky is ugly because she’s chubby is ridiculous.
You know who is butt ugly? Linda Hunt (A fantastic actress with a fabulous voice and from what I can tell, smart and interesting. But ugly.) Without comparing her to people who are actually deformed in some way, I’d say she’s lucky to rate a 2. Using her as the yardstick on one end, and Halle Berry/Angelina jolie/your idea of gorgeous on the other, I’d say SJP rates a solid 7 on her best day. AND, interestingly, precisely because of her pronounced bone structure, she doesn’t lose that much ground when she’s without makeup, unlike a LOT of women considered far more beautiful. That’s the upside to having a face like that, oftentimes. Stronger faces, stronger bones. Darker skin tones, too. This is the no-makeup shot in a series of celebs without and I think she looks fine. (she’s wearing a tiny bit in the shot, you can tell, but nothing that makes a difference.) A damn site better than, say, Jennifer Love Hewitt
Looking at people without makeup is the real test of their real beauty, of course. Unfortunately its hard to find no-makeup pictures of famous women that aren’t also extremely unflattering expressions, angles and lighting. A normal smile or other neutral expression in something less than horrible light is hard to find, and that’s what counts. But some people really are constructed completely by makeup. Oprah is one. With and without she looks like two completely different human beings.
Here’s a few others (trying to only choose fair no-makeup pictures, not particularly terrible ones)
[
[URL=“celeb_makeup_012.jpg (image)”]Renee Zellweger](celeb_makeup_004.jpg (image))
And of course, some women are genuinely, naturally, beautiful.
Halle Berry and that’s BEFORE the nose job.
Oh C’mon, look at her! She may not be your cuppa, but she is NOT ugly! again
YM clearly V, but I think she’s awful. She always looks like she’s in the midst of an allergy attack. All splotchy and nasally and wet-eyed.
Wow, a lot of those no-makeup images look rather like Doppelgangers in their natural form. Which I suppose makes a lot of sense: A good face for an actor or actress is one which can be morphed into whatever appearance is desired for the role.
She may be attractive to you. Which is fine, since attraction is completely subjective. But that face is NOT conventionally attractive by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not symmetrical, it has hard masculine lines, and she’s got a big, crooked nose. Those features have never, ever been considered the ideal standard of female beauty. Because they aren’t feminine.
I must have been the only one who thought that Monica was HOT!
Seriously, I thought she was beautiful.
Apropos of nothing…
Last summer, after Senator McCain announced his choice of running mate, I got into a silly argument with one of my sisters about whether Governor Palin is attractive. I said that, while she is no Portman or Bellucci, she is clearly quite pretty and compared to most politicians is stunning, which is why she got as much press for being attractive as she was. My sister opined that Palin is sub-average and that no man could possibly find her comely, insisting that my theoretical willingness to hit that was due to self-deception.
Monica Lewinsky is a case of someone with perfectly nice, symmetrical, attractive facial features, being stigmatized as ugly because she’s slightly overweight (even though the weight is carried well and evenly distributed) and because she had sex with Bill Clinton.
You can gain or lose weight, but an attractive face is something you either have or don’t have.
The actor Jack Black is another example. A lot of people seem to think Jack Black looks a lot like Emile Hirsch, which he does. Their facial features are fundamentally the same. Jack Black is fat and hairy, so he is considered unattractive. But if he were to lose 70 pounds, I think he would universally be considered handsome by most people, because he has symmetrical, handsome facial features.
I thought so, too.