That beauty is in the eye of the beholder is a comfortable lie.

Certainly, each perspective is based on an attitude and can thus capture its own beautiful picture.

Nevertheless, there are many perspectives that inevitably overlap.

And the overlap is then what is collectively perceived as beautiful: the conventional ideal of beauty.

Caroline O Jebens

Editor in the society department at FAZ.NET.

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Quite apart from the fact that this sentence somehow always seems as if its creator, the historian Thucydides from ancient Greece, wanted to comfort a person who does not fit this ideal - he could not have guessed what our eyes were looking at 2500 years later are banned.

These days, eyes look for beauty for hours on end on a small, rectangular display.

A platform washes up 95 million new pictures every day, in which a billion viewers drown their eyes.

However, these images do not challenge one to discover the individually beautiful;

they are already pleasing to the ideal.

Has it been retouched - or operated on?

In the past one could meet it with diets, exercise, cosmetics, clothes;

today it also works through retouching, through filters.

And somewhere in between, knives cut skin, rasps scrape bones to give the body the shape it should have always had.

Doesn't everyone have the right to determine their own body and image?

Is it really so reprehensible to seek your true self in conventional beauty?

Or do a few by this claim take many others into clan custody?

By putting pressure on them, asking them to deal more intensively with their bodies, with their image?

By not letting them forget that there is always an observer who determines what is beautiful and what is not?

On Instagram there is not only a lot of conventional beauty to look at, but also that: profiles that take care of the problem behind it.

They try to mediate between those who are photographed particularly often and those who see a particularly large number of these photographs.

The accounts are called @celebface or @celebplasticfaces or @social_media_vs_real_life.

Your operators ask questions like: Has it been posed?

retouched?

filtered?

Or: Has an operation been performed?

For some (this is emphasized again and again) it is not about embarrassing: because people, especially women, who are in the public eye are usually considered beautiful anyway, but those who are idealized are at the same time forced to submit to these ideals .

After all, it is hard enough to be constantly observed and judged.

So I'd rather make it politely visible that these beautiful, famous women (and some men) are never as perfect as they appear.

But it's not about showing that they're actually ugly and only beautiful because they're rich.

It's about recognizing that not even the most ideal among us are ideal - and that the others would do badly to measure themselves against them.