Criteria of beauty

Florian GERVASONI, Thibaut BOISSAC, Aurélien HARO 1°L

Criteria of beauty

The word beauty is overused and misunderstood because we can't define what is beautiful or not. Everybody has their own judgment of what is beautiful in a person.

The people of Mursi is based in Ethiopia. It's one of the last African people where women are still wearing labial ornaments.

They have a plate in their lips at 10 years old. After the extraction of inferior incisors , the lower lip is perforated and a wooden dowel is implanted. The orifice expands year by year by the introduction of bigger and bigger cylinder, up to the implementation of a big record of clay decorated with engravings.

Some anthropologists think that these practices were made to make women unsightly to protect their from slave raid.

Today, this practice is only symbolic because slavery was abolished and only women in a high cast can have a plate in their lips. The bigger the plate is, the quicker the woman finds a husband.