Pretty, yes?

'Cultural beliefs represent our understanding about what is true.' Different cultures do indeed have different and distinct set of beliefs and perceptions to what are deemed to be acceptable in the society. Culture tends to be passed down from generation to generation, therefore there remains the persistence in the unique mindsets of people from various cultures.

As the popular saying goes, ' beauty is in the eyes of the beholder', what is perceived to be beautiful by some may thought to be awful by others. This ideology is especially apt in this multi-cultural diverse world that we live in. In the picture above, all e women (or erm girls) depicted have just one thing in common, they are all seen as beautiful, that is in their respective cultures.

In certain Islamic countries such as Iran, strict dress codes are required of females for the sake of modesty. Women are expected to be covered from head to toe, revealing only their hands and faces, or in some cases only their eyes are allowed to be shown if stricter Islamic laws are enforced. Such dressing may be a culture shock to people like us who live in the liberal part of the world, but in the Muslim society it is just part of the culture to be covered up and it is in fact a norm to do so. The indigenous group Karen Hill Tribe, otherwise more commonly known as the 'long neck' tribe in Northern Thailand, is also another example of how beauty is perceived under another culture very different from the mainstream mentality. It has been theorised that the coils originate from the desire to look more attractive by exaggerating sexual dimorphism (the systematic difference in form between individuals of different sex in the same species), as women have more slender necks than men.

In the modernized eastern and western societies, beauty once again take a different form. Attractive Chinese women are usually idealized to be fair skinned, doe eyed with long silky jet black hair; a reflection of how a gentle and demure asian female should look. The western world however defines women with tanned complexion and toned

curvaceous figures as sexy and alluring. We can understand from these examples that culture involves the programming of the mind. Beauty is interpreted differently by people from different cultures due to certain patterns of thinking, feeling and acting that have been instilled and established within a person's mind, therefore we are unable to understand how coils fastened around the necks can be deemed to be attractive as this set of tradition has never been taught to us as an idea of how beauty can be perceive.

Ultimately we can conclude that your degree of gorgeousness usually depends on what your culture understands beauty to be, and in the current cruel world we reside in, prettiness is more often than not measured by your degree of anorexic-ness :(