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 physical appearance, human, physical and/or appearance:
“Even the simple act that we call “going to visit a person of our acquaintance” is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)
“Whenever reality reinforces a child’s fantasied dangers, the child will have more difficulty in overcoming them...So, while parents may not regard a spanking as a physical attack or an assault on a child’s body, the child may regard it as such, and experience it as a confirmation of his fears that grown-ups under certain circumstances can really hurt you.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)