Pre-school Children’s Perception of Beauty

Abstract

This study was conducted to identify the factors that lead to pre-school children’s perception of beauty and to determine if this population have a common notion of beauty. 65 pre-school children were asked to choose which among a gallery of faces (14 pictures of 7 females; 2 pictures per face, 1 smiling and 1 with a neutral facial expression) did they consider beautiful and to rank them from most to least beautiful. The children were asked why they thought the faces were beautiful. This study found that children chose the same face more than others as their “beautiful face” suggesting that at this age, there seem to be common notions of what constitutes beauty. When asked why they thought this face was more beautiful than the others, the children referred to objects external to the face (i.e., jewelry, the use of cosmetics, dress color) as the reasons why the face was beautiful. They also referred to actions or behaviors they attributed to the person (i.e., washing the face, taking a bath, using shampoo, brushing the teeth, cleaning ears with cotton buds) as reasons why that person’s face was beautiful. Finally, children identified as beautiful, faces that were free of “blemishes” such as the absence of pimples, “mute?, and “kulangof. In the free responses, very rarely would children identify beauty in terms of the features of the face and refer to externals, attributions, and what is absent in their determination of beauty. Responses point to a commonality in pre-school children’s notions of what constitutes beauty but may have difficulty in explaining their choices. Instead, children use egocentric explanations for what they consider as beautiful, drawn from their own experiences.