The Cult of Beauty is an amazing exhibition in London and an invitation to widen and challenge our understanding of beauty beyond the binaries of beautiful or ugly, natural or artificial, physical or digital.

It is a space that allows seeing beauty at both ends and everywhere in between. Beauty is as scientific as it is poetic, as engineered as inherent.

I loved this exhibition and truly recommend it to anyone who wants to stretch their perceptions beyond boundaries.

Like many other things, beauty went through her own development and got wider as our human perception can get. Ideals of beauty have existed in every culture and era. Attaining and sustaining these qualities sometimes becomes a cult-like pursuit. Philosophers look to define beauty, artists try to capture it, scientists innovate to achieve it.

While these definitions are not universal, our emotional connection to beauty is shared. It inspires feelings ranging from desire to rejection, pain to pleasure, ecstasy to greed. Our inner relationship to beauty is an intrinsic part of life for many of us, directly linked to our sense of health and wellbeing.

It encourages us to claim and express beauty through our identities and to define beauty according to our own values.

Beautiful and virtuous! Is an Italian saying reflecting the belief that external beauty is associated with inner qualities.

Humans have an instinctual desire to see ourselves. But for millennia that meant only seeing silhouettes or dim and distorted reflections. Today we see ourselves more than ever before.

The way we see our self-image has changed drastically but we also need to ask: has the relationship with self-perception changed to an empowering one? Even the Queens of ancient Egypt knew that beauty that connects to the divine is a spiritual one.

What does beauty mean to you? How would you define it?

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