How did people decide what was beautiful (male/female) in the past?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Just that, really. I know about medieval standards of beauty a bit, and I know they had a huge thing for blonde women, liked their men bearded, and so on. But I don't know much about the last 500 years or about whether it's different in different bits of Europe. Obviously I guess it must be once you get outside Europe!

But how did people judge what was attractive in a man or a woman?

I know that people must have varied as much as we do but there must also be things we'd think were completely odd to find sexy, but that were attractive back in the day. I know in about 1375 Chaucer has the Wife of Bath say she's attractive because she has a gap in her teeth.

I also wonder how much people genuinely looked very different in the past and now. Of course we are healthier on the whole and I understand we're a bit bigger than women used to be, but I wonder what else has changed.

I know the thread has moved on slightly, but I thought I'd share this link to a blog of historical hotties My Daguerrotype Boyfriend. I've spent many's the hour perusing this.

Janine, that is just brilliant.

There's a really cool post where they find lookalikes for modern day slebs. It's here. Some MN favourites among them: Fassbender, David Morrissey.

I want to do Mark Twain. Before he grew the moustache he had in all the other pictures of him I've seen.

Great thread.
As an aside and an indicator that we are genetically predisposed to run to fat if we can afford to eat as much as we want, most monarchs were fat!

a) Charles II. Hottie, definitely.
b) William of Orange. Surprisingly attractive.
c) John Donne. Seeing the portrait at Hertford College was the great disappointment of my teenage years, way beyond any heartbreak related to actual boys.

I always wonder about cats. In early paintings, they have weird goggle eyes. Is that because cats used to have weird goggle eyes and we have bred them to have flatter faces, or because for some reason people painted cat eyes as goggly?

Janine, THANK YOU

John Calhoun Chamberlain...good GOD, would you look at him!!! I don't think "chaplain". I think naughty thoughts.

My pleasure!

Ermm, you know the colour picture of the bloke who was hanged for killing lincoln which is obviously a Very Bad Thing. Well, i totally would

Hester imagine you mistyped your request as I just did into your time machine and got this similarly named, not so hottie:
YIKES

Janine, that's amazing ... thanks!

grendels -I forget the details, but I believe some breeds have issues with brains because of the face shape breeders preferred.

I'm not going to look at John Donne. He can stay in my imagination.

OP I haven't read your whole thread but your question reminded me of when I lived aged 21 in a developing country where everyone was a different colour to me and there were very few Westerners, and no Western young women at all. So when I arrived I looked around and thought, nah these guys would never turn me on.
after two deeply immersive months I began to change and see them as male, as the opposite sex, as the option so to speak. Also there was no telly, no technology, no other input from outside and they became my norm. And then within that norm there was more beautiful and less so etc.
But limiting the pool and exposure to outsiders effected my attraction profoundly. I wonder whether the same tiny world, like the Tudor court etc created it's own enclosed areas.

I had a similar experience in China MrsJavier

Oh good God, helpyourself, he looks like Death from Terry Pratchett.

And of course mirrors were rare in olden times.
Tess' mum holds a dark cloth up to a window so Tess can see what she looks like before pimping her off to Alec

Helpyourself, I always look back with fascination at my former self, thinking, these guys are all short, these guys are not my type, I don't speak their language, they smell odd, they were weird s**t, they do not turn me on and never will…
And then…. then….. you immerse and they are just guys and if you like guys they're the only guys you can see!
Nature is fairly pragmatic I guess

Going back to crunchyfrogs post on page 2 about how the children at school now seem more uniformly blond/e - have you moved to a new area of the UK from where you went to school?

I was taught (and it may be bollocks) that Yorkshire and the NE has a higher proportion of light-haired children than Lancashire, as a residue of the Vikings. And Wales has more dark-haired people than anywhere else in the UK.

Have a look at the USC Libraries International Photographic Mission for an archive of pictures of people from around the world dating from the C19th. I found it looking through the Basel Mission Archive for pictures of West Africa. It gives me an idea of the world of my great grandparents, for which there are no family photos.

I love the way In the Basel Archive there are so many photos just captioned 'hairstyles' as they captured the young women's modes of the day.

I think that's true Bluestones. There is a distinct East Yorks coast look indistinguishable from the facially reconstructed Viking figures at the Jorvik Centre in York.

Thin face, beaky nose, sandy colouring (I have East Yorks relatives), a lot of very fair and auburn-haired people too.

I believe it. I'm in E Yorks and I've noticed the number of tall blond children, and this is a village school where very many (most?) of the families are local.

There is the old saying of course that the Welsh are the descendants of the Iberian Celts, hence the "Welsh dark" look. It's very distinctive once you know it - dark haired and eyed, short and stocky.

And the other accepted truth is, though I have no idea how true it is or not, that the west coasts of Ireland and Scotland have a lot of Iberian looking people, because of the number of sailors from the dispersed and wrecked Armada as they tried sailing north and west round Britain and Ireland. Probably a little bit fanciful!

Helpyourself Take another look at
John C Calhoun

Scone

They did a survey in York a few years back and it turned out that many of the residents did have "Viking" dna or something like that
here it is www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/9486699.Researchers_collect_DNA_from_men_with_possible_links_to_York___s_Viking_past/