Human physical appearance refers to the outward phenotype or look of human beings. There are infinite variations in human phenotypes, though society reduces the variability to distinct categories. Physical appearance of humans, in particular those attributed which are regarded as important for physical attractiveness, are believed by anthropologists to significantly affect the development of personality and social relations. Humans are acutely sensitive to their physical appearance, some theorize for reasons of evolution. Some differences in human appearance are genetic, others are the result of age, lifestyle or disease, and many are the result of personal adornment.
Some people have traditionally linked some differences in personal appearance such as skeletal shape with ethnicity, such as prognathism or elongated stride. Different cultures place different degrees of emphasis on physical appearance and its importance to social status and other phenomena.
Famous quotes containing the words human, physical and/or appearance:
“Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long- wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Let us hope ... that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“What! Would you make no distinction between hypocrisy and devotion? Would you give them the same names, and respect the mask as you do the face? Would you equate artifice and sincerity? Confound appearance with truth? Regard the phantom as the very person? Value counterfeit as cash?”
—Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)