About Health and Beauty

Transcription

1 About Health and Beauty (in redaction) Health and beauty are often related. People who are in good health are often beautiful. Let me begin by speaking about beauty, since it is the one that people understand more easily. What is beauty? In the text Human Figure Drawing Proportions ( ), beauty is related to good proportions of the different parts of the body in regard to the body itself. It begins often by that; the proportions are defined for slim body. In a fatty body, these proportions are not respected and beauty is lost. However beauty goes also beyond that. You can have, for example, good proportions for the cranium and look silly, have eye abnormalities, like strabismus, for example,, etc,, and beauty is lost. In fact with any abnormality visible on the body, like skin abnormality (related to pigmentation, bumps, etc.) beauty is lost. Many of those abnormalities come with illnesses. Other points are symmetry like it is measured on this face and placement. Still are ther other points, like normal ranges when the entire body is taken into account. Thus if I suufer of excessive height (gigantism) or insufficient heigth, like in hypopituitarism, I cannot be considered as beautiful. Populations can also be considerd for the normal ranges of the whole body, but the other criteria stay unchanged (I have quoted here five to six). There are still other things that refer to the skin, particularly that of the face and there other criteria that refer to the age. This man is certainly the most ugly of the other bodies represented, but if the age is taken into account, he may may not be considered as an ugly man. Examples of a good proportional human bodies

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4 A beautiful young girl and an already overweight young lady, having lost much of her beauty. Proportions of the different segments of the body are not the only elements when considering beauty. The amount of fat is also to be

5 considered into consideration as well as the skin delicacy On those pictures, proportions are represented by triangles, rectangles, circles and lines. They are considered as normal proportions (i.e., with regard to the body), The rectangles refer to lenght on the figure on the left (the little girl). The figure on the right can easily mislead you; so do not refer to them; just retain that in a beautiful woman as the one shown here, the head is smaller then the the thorax, the abdomen is less wide than the thorax ouside of pregnancy and the hip is the largest part of the axial body; the arms are ¼ shorter than the legs. On this adlescent girl, good proportions are shown for the pelvis- height and right to left diameter, a necessity for the pregnant women who want to avoid Cesarian section. However these proprotions are also related to the deepness of the pelvis, the antero-posterior diameter. In many African women, Cesarian sections are not needed and this seemed to be related to the deepness of their pelvis. In the ladies of European genealogy, this deepness might have been lost due to a long period at school where you have to seat almost the whole day. A beautiful body needs not to be an athletic body, like in this sculpture of a Greek athlete, and sometimes beauty can be lost when some parts of the body, lke the thorax, become disproportionately large in comparison to the other parts of the body. Often those people with a very muscular body tend to die early, due to heart problems. In a fatty body and in some women who may look sexy, with large breasts or/and a large buttocks, the good proportions are lost as well as beauty. Sketchs of good proportional human body

6 Here the heads are the heights, but also the widenesses are to be taken into account, the dianeters of the circle, the dimensions pf the triangles and other

7 geometric shapes relatively to the whole body. However, not only the proportions and the symmetry are to be taken into account but also what is to be considered in our present time a normal human height, neither too shorth neither too tall, and what is to be considered normal width at the different levels of the human body. Being too small may be the result of poor nutrition, a soil poor in iodine or other characteristics of the soil and of the daily diet. Being too tall may also be related to the diet and the characteristics of the soil in the area where we live. Finally the skin delicacy is also to be taken into account and it is why most elderly people are not considered beautiful as is this middle aged lady.

8 Is beauty relative?

9 In some countries, people tend to be tall and beutiful people are regarded as tall people; in other countries where people tend to be short, it is the contrary. In countries, like the USA, where people tend to be fat, due to an inappropriate alimentation, people with large breast and large buttocks are often considered beautiful, while in other countries, like in India, where people tend to be slim, it is the contrary. However, when beauty is related to health, this relativity to the country or to the geographical region tends to disappear, such as in gigantism and marfan syndrome for the tall people and to dwarfism, achondro- or dyschondroplaia [where the proportions are already lost] and undernutrtion or the environment, for the short people. The height of a human being has often something to see with his alimentation and with the richness or the poorness of the soil in some essential nutritients. As for his weight, it is often related to the daily diet. In the following pictures, I will tell you what I consider as a beautiful body, a borderline one and an ugly body Venus of Boticelli

10 Black Venus (with no malformation and adequate body proportions, an agreable face with no excess of fatty tissue, nippples and breasts in correct proportions and well developped with no excess of fat, flat abdomen, slim flank and well developped pelvis diameters with no excess fat in the buttocks). Examples of a good proportional human bodies

11 Beutiful bodies painted by Pierre A. Renoir; the seating body on the left of the 1rst picture is the one that can be most appreciated. The right picture is Boderline, because the breast of this damsel, painted by Renoir, may be too large. The 3 rd picture is that of an Ugly body painted by Renoir, because this mother looks to be overweight or too fatty

12 In fact, to be beautiful like the Black Venus shown above, you should have no body abnormality - bone and soft tissues- no pathological lesion, no excess of fat, and an agreable face; an adequate height is alo needed, but this is often relative to the population. Beauty is often related to health and is also often related to intelligence.. Why the nipples are important? The nipples do not add only to the beauty of a woman. It is also a sign that the woman can do well her task of feeding her baby or her future baby. Black beauty with adequate body proportions, no excess of body fat and well developed sexual parts such as the breasts and nipples Y a t il une culture de la laideur? Is there a cult of ugliness? ( What is health now? Health can be described as the absence of diseases. Now we will have to understand what is disease. People may look healthy and have diseases. Those

13 people who look healthy may even have contagious diseases that they transfer to other people. It is what testing like it is done for the sexually transmitted diseases is important. In the American Heritage Dictionary, disease is defined as it follows: A pathological condition of a part, an organ, or a system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms It is a short and resumed definition. In fact, disease is any abnormality in a living organism whether it is: 1) visible or narrated as for the signs and symptoms 2) or not visible, but detected by imaging tests or laboratory values, including physiologic or metabolic ones, genetic ones (or DNA ones), anatomic ones 3) or not even yet detected or diagnosed. It is where the interests of prevention, screening and checkout lie.