I often see people staring blankly ‘in’ the face of a beautiful person…  Sometimes the gaze makes you wonder, are they really ‘leching’?  Not to condone such behavior, but it makes you wonder, what is going through these people’s heads?

They aren’t even conscientious of their act. It is as if they are not there. Their vacant gaze seem to come from the wall behind,  as if they have merged in the background and they are nothing but a pair of eyes, the only connection between here and a world inside their heads. uncanny.

Why does a person fly away momentarily out of the real world when their gaze land on the face of a beautiful person? It is as if their gaze is always in search of a portal to their inner world. And it gets unlocked only by the sight of a beautiful face. Why else does one compulsively checkout faces of others in a crowded subway? We are forever in search of the key to our flight.

The conventional wisdom is,
Conventional beauty = aggregate of different visages.

An average face in the  sea of variety.  A plateau in the hills. A smoothed pebble in the real world of rocks and sponges. and so on.

My theory is,

A face with conventional beauty is beautiful because the others can project their perspectives on such faces without jarring the reality.  The average face very well may be of an average person. But given such a  canvas we can’t help but paint it with mystery and possibilities.

We welcome people with beautiful faces in our conversations or smiles because their face is the ultimate screen for our fantasies to play out. The welcome is an appeal to authority. In a manner of speaking, through these screens, we try to communicate with a higher power. We perceive the audience to be bigger than it is, wondering who else behind the screen might listen to what we have to say. We want them to remain mysterious, so we listen less and talk more or see without listing.

And that’s why ‘dumb blonde’ was born.  Dumbness is quite democratic.  Dumb people exist among all races,  all genders,  all cultures and so on.  But dumb utterance by a person with beautiful appearance is jarring. It crashes you back from a reverie to the real world with a certain unpleasant thud.