Beauty is only skin deep

It’s nothing but a lie. People make thousands of conclusions about who you within the first few minutes they see you. When you change your appearance you change how others see you, by extension how they treat you, and finally your behavior or who you are. If this statement was a simple truth it wouldn’t be necessary for all the feel-good people to try to keep drilling it into our heads. Ugly on the outside in most cases leads to ugly on the inside and yes I’m ugly, so, yes, I know.

The truth is beauty is not skin deep, it is genetic. It is human nature to pursue beauty because it strengthens our own gene pool. Usually beauty is defined by body symmetry. One study actually came to the conclusion that symmetrical people where judged more attractive than non-symmetrical people.

So what you ask?

Non-symmetrical bodies and faces are a visual clue that the person you are looking is genetically “defective”. Another study had a group of pictures shown to people from different countries, consistently the same people were found attractive. Beauty it concluded was not a cultural phenomenon.

Just what I picked-up from Mean Genes, a book co-authored by Jay Phelan who earned his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard and specializes in evolutionary genetics and aging.

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Personally I think the saying means just what it says, “beauty is only skin deep”, true beauty lies beneath the surface of the superficial exterior.

"Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may."
-- Plato, from his Symposium

The phrase "Beauty is only skin deep" probably didn't come from Plato, although he is often credited as the first to express the idea. Something approaching the modern form was first used by Thomas Overbury (1581-1613) in his poem "A Wife".

'All the carnall beauty of my wife, Is but skin deep'.

The first written instance of the current form in its exact wording was in 1878, when Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (AKA The Dutchess) used it in her book Molly Bawn.

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A few quotes:

People often say that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves. - Salma Hayek

The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin deep saying. --John Ruskin

Beauty is only skin deep, and the world is full of thin skinned people. -- Richard Armour

Beauty is only skin deep, but it's a valuable asset if you're poor or haven't any sense. -Kin Hubbard

Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder. -Laurence J. Peter, creator of The Peter Principle

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want -- an adorable pancreas? -- Jean Kerr

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye - Miss Piggy

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Bitter_engineer's quote, "Beauty is only skin deep--but ugly goes clear to the bone" is often called Parker's Law.