Can one really define beauty? Based on Cambridge English Dictionary beauty is “the quality of being pleasing, especially to look at, or someone or something that gives great pleasure, especially when you look at it”. Another common definition says that beauty is “a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.”

​

However, what pleases the aesthetic senses of the contemporary human being will please the aesthetic senses of the human living in the year 3000? Or would it have pleased the aesthetic senses of the prehistoric man?

​

These are time related questions, but even nowadays, what is beautiful for one person may not be beautiful, or may even be ugly, for another person. Furthermore, one may consider something as being ugly, awkward, or unpleasant one day, while the same thing can be beautiful or at least visually pleasing the very next day according to the energetic vibration in which one finds oneself.

​

I harbour no intention of going into an endless debate since the relation between beauty and ugliness has been one of the major sources of contention in historical debates on the concept from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine to Albrecht Dürer, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Rosenkranz to mention but a few. On top of that, they were all right because each of them chose the truth he wanted to explore. We all choose to explore a certain truth, we have our reasons for doing that and undoubtedly it is our right to explore any truth we want at some point or another.

​

My truth, that I choose to explore now, says that beauty is a subjective interpretation. We can’t give a definition for a word that is a symbol used by each of us according with our own beliefs, with our own interpretation. What we experience in this physical reality through our emotions and our thoughts are always interpretations, our “personal” ego interprets what our thoughts create.

​

We translate, we interpret different elements in this way; we create symbols, we create categories, we label something as beautiful or as ugly but if we pay attention, we can easily discover that our interpretation is changing in time according with the new set of rules, with the new system of beliefs we have at the time of interpretation.

​

With that being said, can one really define beauty?