Call an Aesthetician: How Do We Know What is Beautiful?

From the Archive: We know it when we see it, but we don't really know what it is

Artist's Shit, 1961. Piero Manzoni

I’ve worked as a journalist and editor in the beauty industry for around ten years now. I should stress, as you might suspect, that this doesn’t give me much understanding of what beauty actually is. The industry operates upon a sort of vague collective understanding of what a beautiful person looks, feels and smells li…