Aesthetics: What is Beauty and Ugliness?

I think of beauty and ugliness as emotions rather than physical attributes.

Beauty is the emotion you feel when you look at something that pleases and attracts you. Ugly is the oppsite, it displeases and repulses.

That's why beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Your reaction depends on your social conditioning and experience.

A person can be attractive if they remind you of something or some-one good in your life, even if that person doesn't fit the ideal of beauty. Alternatively, you may find a conventionally beautiful person unnattractive if they resemble some-one who bullied you at school.

Certain types of conditioning are common to our culture, for example exposure to advertising and pop music conditions you to a certain image of beauty.

To me the evolutionary biology notion of beauty makes the most sense. It is all about reproduction. Men want women that look healthy and capable of getting easily pregnant and women want men that look healthy and or strong.

Off topic, but not totally: Often evolutionary biology is used to explain why men are so promiscious. But a lot a people do not seem to know that women are as promiscious; there strategy is to have a relationship with a man with a solid position in society AND to have a beautiful lover with who they also conceive children.

Actually, there has been done quite some research and the obvious again has been reaffirmed. People like women to have feminine faces (small nose, small jaw, large eyes) and men to have male faces (just the opposite). We like women to be shorter than men, to have an hourglass figure while we like men to have narrow hips and a V shaped torso. Yes of course there are exceptions.

With regard to somebody's personality, I am quite capable of differentiating between looks and character. So I can feel that somebody is nice yet ugly and vice versa.

Well, it has been my experience the "beauty" ad "ugliness" are relative. One person may look at a person and say "God, he/she is hot." Another person might look at that same person and say, "No, they aren't."