beauty

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Have you ever noticed how people who eat only junk food and sit at a computer all day, never getting exercise have an unattractive hue to their skin? Of course there is your classic world-of-warcraft shut-in who’s diet consists of doritos and ice cream. What is it about their skin that makes them unattractive?

Research out of Bristol and St. Andrew’s, UK has shed light on the link between an attractive skin color in humans and the lifestyle that goes with it. As no surprise to the health nut, maintaining a nutritious diet and getting regular exercise determines the attractiveness of one’s skin tone.

“We knew from our previous work that people who have more blood and more oxygen color in their skins looked healthy, and so we decided to see what other colors affect health perceptions. This has given us some clues as to what other skin pigments may relate to a healthy appearance.”

Science has already clued us into the harmful damage sun exposure does to the skin cells.  Also, with the recent findings in other studies suggesting that spray-on tanning may cause lung cancer, it is perhaps fitting to revisit the basics of human health.  Your skin is a walking billboard of your internal health.  So don’t fry your integument in the sun and don’t spray chemicals on it either.  If you eat healthy, clean foods and get exercise you won’t have a need to change your skin color artificially.

Read more at Science Daily

The next sections of the ICR attribute causality of the things we appreciate to a god. The first deals with “God Caused Beauty“. The entire argument states that beauty is a ration and emotional reaction to the world around us and that we hunger for beauty:

That such a hunger exists only in the human being is a wonder in itself! The flower is not impressed with its own majesty; it merely exists with no conscious awareness. The chimpanzee does not gaze longingly on the enigma of the Mona Lisa, nor do the stars muse on the heavens they themselves grace.

First of all, we do not know for certain whether other animals see and appreciate the world in similar ways as humans. They certainly are not at a cognitive level where describing, labeling and recreating beauty is within their power, but that is not evidence for the lack of appreciation. Secondly, through evolution, humans are conditioned to seek what we describe as beauty in nature. It is a survival mechanism when hunting for colorful fruit or lush streams to drink from. We see “beauty” in the opposite sex as part of an attraction mechanism that is involved with natural selection. “Beauty” is a human observation given to visible things around us that we take pleasure in. If the human race evolved to what it has become today but on the planet Mars, we would think red skies and barren desert landscapes were beautiful. Things are what they are regardless of the human qualitative descriptor.

In fact, all humanity eschews destruction and random chaos as “ugly” and attempts to mask death with various levels of cosmetic disguises, and this speaks to the realization that some sights and sounds are not beautiful, and thus there must exist a standard of perfect beauty.

This deduction does not follow. The human perspective on human actions as positive or negative does not require that there be a standard of perfect beauty. The author here is using human attributes as proof for a supernatural perfect being while asserting that humanity is itself imperfect. Perfection does not equal existance.