Is perfection in physical beauty an impossibility?

Through a wonderful and amazing combination of imperfections, you are yourself.
They- yes, that is, the infamous other; or, more specifically in this case, any clothing or cosmetics company- would have you know differently.
They are building up your self-expectations of your outward image from first time you lay eyes on a television screen. Are they building you up to watch you fall? Are they selling you things that you need, or do you only feel like you need these things because you have been told you need them?

Advertising is an art. That's not an arguable point, it's a fact. It is taught in art schools around the world. It is also a science that goes much deeper and has more of an effect on us than many of us would like to admit.
Who decided that a certain model should be presented as a beautiful person? And why do people agree that she is? Is it because they really think so based on their own ideas, or is it because they have been conditioned from such a young age to think of beauty in types? Or is it a combination of both- and then to what degree is it which?

So many times I look at pictures of people in magazines that have been presented as being beautiful and I just don't get it. Their appearance seems to me, completely unremarkable in every sense.

Be yourself. But what does that even mean in a world that is so confusedly commercialized and stereotyped?
I think the punk and hip-hop movements were the last movements of people wanting to be themselves, to be something apart from what the squares would have them be, that really took hold and created something different...and now even those things are wildly commercialized (while certain strands remain relatively untouched.) Beauty cannot be corporatized. Because corporations inherently rape things of their beauty and are concerned only for furthering their own ends, an ideal of beauty put forth by a corporation is inherently ugly in some sense. (In most cases, in my opinion, because the people depicted have been altered in appearance to make them conform to some bland, cookie-cutter type image; robbed of their defining characteristics.)

I read a discussion on beauty somewhere that basically came to the conclusion that what a society agrees is physical beauty is approximately the mean of the appearances of the people that make up that society.
At surface level that seems fairly legitimate, and perhaps is maybe the best way we have to describe it. But then is that really true, or is it just that advertisers pull from that median group because they increase their chances of hitting somewhere closer to what people find attractive?
Personally, I am intrigued by things I haven't seen before. Sometimes I decide that I really like those things, and sometimes I decide that they are terrible. But I decide. Whether that decision is conscious or subconscious and automatic is a different question, but you do decide. Then you perpetuate that decision by reinforcing that thought.

So then can there be any consensus on what is beautiful in a person's appearance? Because if we are influenced by so many outward sources that we can't even recognize them all, and we make decisions of what we think about beauty automatically, how can we know what we really think? Do I even think at all, or am I just a product of everything I have seen and been exposed to?

It's just a brain aneurysm waiting to happen.

So is everything beautiful, and it's all a matter of what experiences we have and decisions we make- whether those be forced and subconscious through advertising, or very actively decided in our own minds- or is it that nothing is beautiful, and we decide to accept things because they are what we know?

Being yourself is something that I regard as truly beautiful, but in this world that we live in it is one of the hardest things we can do, even when we have a complete handle on who we are and what we believe. Self-expression is limited by commercialization. As E.E. Cummings said it, "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."

To me, wrinkles in a person’s skin are beautiful. Moles, freckles, and scars are beautiful, as are so many other irregularities in human appearances. Is a person more beautiful when they are carefully composed and made-up or when they are falling apart and vulnerable? I find that when a person is broken down, it tells a much more truthful story of the humanity of their person, and that truth, to me, is a beautiful thing.

Ultimately though, that decision is yours. I create images for you to decide either its beauty or its ugliness, or both.