I saw on YouTube a feature about the most beautiful faces in the Philippines.
Years ago, I ran a research on the most beautiful faces in the world, classifying beauty with charm, grace and class. The respondents were a random sampling of selected students, business and civic leaders, using random interviews and questionnaires. Delimitations were the limited representations and number of respondents who based their observations on the people familiar with them. International beauty title holders were excluded.
Beauty could be defined in many ways. The romanticists think beauty depends on the eyes of the beholder. Beauty, for the classicist, is a face with well-chiseled features, oval-shaped face, almost perfect skin complexion, among others. The respondents were not classified accordingly.
The choices centered only on facial beauty, excluding body figures and fixtures. The research could not be classified as formal, absolute or scientific, but only descriptive. It suits the subject of this article. I wrote a similar article on this subject years ago.
The responses of the study became my bases of choosing the participants for the three musicales I produced, scripted and directed for the University of San Jose-Recoletos and the Zonta Club of Cebu 1: “Glamour and Glitz 1 and 2,” “The Women Legends, “The Legends of Men,” “A Towel and a Piece of Candy” for the Ruping children victims and “A Night in the Oscars.”
The following were survey results:
A. International: Most beautiful were Elizabeth Taylor, Rosanna, Podesta, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Brooke Shields and Ursula Andre.
B. National: Amalia Fuentes, Gloria Romero, Pilar Pilapil, Marian de la Riva, Barbara Perez, Marlene Dauden, Vina Morales, Iza Calzado and Marian Rivera.
C. Separate results (updated) included the prettiest faces in Cebu with respondents from the tourism, business, travel and academe sectors: Amparito Lhuillier, Margie Lhuillier, Annie Osmeña, Nelia Neri, Aida Uy, Marilou Cañizares, Marget Villarica, Mariquita Yeung, Alice Woolbright, Nora Sol (now Muntuerto), Petite Garcia, Bessie Villamor and Pilar Puno. (Most of these women were my choices for my “Women Legends,” “Night of the Oscars” and “Glamour and Glitz” musicales).
You would notice that the age bracket was between 40 and above. My brother, couturier Larrie Silva, observed that the “full blossoming of a woman’s beauty and charm, starts in her early 40s.”
I am sure there are more hidden beauties in many places. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Rhodora,” some beautiful flowers grow in the desert and enliven the dry environs.
“If eyes are made for seeing, then beauty has its own excuse for being.”
Dear readers, who are in your lists of the beautiful women in Cebu? And, who are the handsomest men in Cebu? All these give us lighter, more pleasant moments as we rest our minds from the pains caused by Covid-19 and Odette.
Send in your ideas through my Facebook!