Beauty as Evaluation

This chapter presents a new integrated model to understand when and how “beauty pays”. Following Lamont’s cultural process model, we conceptualize beauty as an open-ended evaluation process that sparks social boundary-drawing. This results in social dis/advantage, which reinforces durable, intersecting inequalities. We reformulate existing approaches as “beauty as aesthetic capital” approaches, assuming agreement on beauty, and “beauty standards as distinction” approaches, assuming that boundaries are drawn along lines of socially variable beauty standards. Both approaches suggest that “returns” to beauty are more open-ended for less privileged groups. We illustrate the usefulness of this model with a Q-sort study in Hong Kong. We find a range of evaluation processes, showing both agreement and disagreement on beauty, drawing boundaries of class, race, gender and ethnicity. Hong Kongers offered negative aesthetic evaluations of the appearance of “mainland” Chinese, showing how social cleavages are expressed in the language of beauty. Seeing beauty as evaluation allows us to bridge existing research traditions, sheds new light on the consequences of beauty particularly for disadvantaged groups, and corrects simplistic, popular insights on beauty as a form of capital.