In order to try to reveal the essence of beauty definition it is necessary to get to the gist of the matter. Children quickly learn who among them is considered attractive, although this will change as the peer group ages. More often, evolving judgements on beauty and aesthetics are based on appearance, personality and behaviour. Those who win friends, enjoy popularity and achieve high status through sport or employment will be associated with qualities that may match the forms of virtue, European
and Asian beauty, nobility, etc. Those who inspire fear and loathing will often be characterised as unattractive or ugly but, if they nevertheless wield power and accumulate wealth within society, they may be considered sexually attractive. It depends on the qualities the partners wish to see in their children.
People use signs to associate themselves with the most successful groups within their society. In cultures where pale skin is valued, people modify their behaviour, in line with beauty definition, to avoid acquiring a tan or use face paints and whitening creams (e.g. in Europe in the Middle Ages and in China, the only people who had dark skin were the poor peasants; the aristocracies therefore valued pale skin as an indicator of their wealth and often relied on lead or other poisonous ingredients in cosmetics to create the lustrous white complexion seen in portraits from the sixteenth-century onward). In cultures where
beauty and aesthetics considered being fat a sign of success, health, and beauty, people modify their diets to achieve a body image reflecting the consensus of
European and Asian beauty among those within the social group they aspire to join (e.g. in China, the fat male belly symbolises happiness, luck, wealth, and generosity; in Europe, the Dionysian aesthetic associates fatness with cheerful and relatively innocent decadence; in modern Ghana the popular view is that "the thicker and heavier, the richer and more attractive a woman is.").
Beauty definition in cultures where certain body parts or athletic forms are desirable, clothing is modified to enhance or disguise beauty and aesthetics (e.g. ancient Greek men exercised in the nude in the gymnasium following the Apollonian ideal, Minoan dresses were usually topless in this matriarchal society, and padded codpieces ensured a European man's reputation appeared intact). Strong correlations between attractiveness and particular physical properties in European and Asian beauty have been found, across cultures. One of the more important properties is symmetry, which is also associated in beauty and aesthetics with physical health. Large, clear eyes are also important. Large eyes are often considered to mark a high degree of attractiveness in East Asia, perhaps because some Asians consider large eyes relatively more rare in Asian populations, and are often spoken about in Asian culture; Asian culture often notes ethnic non-Asians for the size of their eyes. (Nose size and structure can also be determinant in attractiveness, especially in Asian cultures.)
In order to illustrate the point it should be useful to recall how different are the values of, say, european and asian beauty. In fact beauty definition should be constructed with regard to not exclusively aspects of outer appearance but also the state of mind and the personal attitude to others. The appreciation of beauty is present in every country and is characteristics of every nationality , although it is true that ideals vary considerably and European and Asian beauty patterns may have very little in common and a great number of discrepancies.