Allow me to preface: I was in a Comm. class today (yea special-ed central I know) and we were on the topic of "beauty". Essentially my TA, along with the other people in the discussion agreed that virtually all of what is understood to be "beautiful" is culturally defined, and not cross-cultural (in the Western World's case defined by the Media). I took a very different stance, claiming that "beauty" is more biological in that it is quite universal, and certain quantifiable attributes are things that ultimately make one "attractive", in general cases.
Certain aspects such as Hip-to-Weight ratio, the size of the chin,level of estrogen, symmetry are more often than not what defines what people all over the world take into account (even subconsciously) when assessing someone's beauty. After saying this I was bombarded with angry women, yelling about how I'm wrong, how they listen to too much Christina Aguilera (in my mind that's what they said), etc,etc. I'd be very interested to hear the opinions of others on this board regarding the issue of biological beauty vs. culturally defined beauty and which stance you take.
Here are some articles I found on my stance:
http://hss.fullerton.edu/sociology/orleans/symmetry.txt (tl:dr Newsweek article that references a large number of studies, some even done with 3-6 month old infants)
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology...ekanayake.html
http://www.jyi.org/articletools/print.php?id=537