Los Angeles Demographics

What is beauty and who has it?

(CNN) -- Can beauty be defined by age, gender, color, body shape or size? Who gets to decide?

Multibillion-dollar beauty and fashion industries both shape and depend on the cult-like worship of what physical attributes the public sees as beautiful. And most women feel the effects of those decisions.

The photo exhibition "Beauty Culture" at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, with 175 pictures by iconic photographers, is aimed at starting people thinking and talking about female beauty. It also peeks into the underbelly of the beauty industry, including its relation to celebrity, plastic surgery, the faux-perfection of airbrushing of advertising and even child beauty pageants.

There are a lot of hot-button issues as to how the media and the beauty and fashion worlds depict whole groups of people, why they show them in a particular way or barely notice them at all.

However, there's been a major shift when it comes to diversity in beauty advertising and magazine beauty editorial spreads.

Supermodel Veronica Webb, L'Oreal's corporate diversity director Jean-Claude Le Grand, fashion insider Bethann Hardison, Marie Claire's beauty editor Erin Flaherty and others share their thoughts on the evolving and increasingly inclusive take on gorgeousness.

America's changing definition of beautiful

Several studies suggest that many equate beauty with symmetry, but even within that equation, "Each time has its own standard (of beauty)," said photographer Melvin Sokolsky during his lecture at the Annenberg.

View more than 30 former Miss USA Pageant queens

A photographer, an editor or a casting director may be subject to his or her personal predilections of what beauty is and foist them upon the public, leading entire societal likes and dislikes to shift, too.

And that standard in America is changing rapidly. Today, the number of marriages between people of different ethnicities is surging. Back in 1993, Time magazine's cover story "The New Face of America," featuring a computer generated face consisting of a mix of several ethnicities, is indeed more in line with what most of us now consider beautiful, according to Allure's 20th Anniversary Beauty Survey . "Sixty-four percent of all our respondents think women of mixed race represent the epitome of beauty," the survey says.

And of those respondents who said they wished to change their skin color, "70% reported that they wanted it to be darker." Full lips and curvy bodies are also coveted.

Paradigms and Demographics: The American Council on Science and ...

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