Who’s The Most Beautiful Canadian?

Shania Twain, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams are among Hello! Canada magazine's most beautiful Canadians.

Sadly, I wasn’t on the list. I suppose white men with beer-belly guts and rising hairlines just don’t cut it.

Though Justin Bieber and Ryan Reynolds made the list.

You know you’re not going to qualify for a beauty list, when you’re competing against people who haven’t fully gone through puberty yet.

But what makes a beautiful Canadian – or beautiful person – well – beautiful?

A while back, marketing giants Ogilvy& Mather created the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, which featured anything but the traditional supermodels to market women’s skin care products. Average looking women were used, to show where real beauty comes from.

One billboard in the series asked viewers to phone a toll-free number to vote on whether a woman on the billboard was "fat" or "fab". The results were posted real-time on the board. The percentage of "fat" votes overtook "fab", leading to the creation of the Dove Self-Esteem Fund that claims to change the Western concept of beauty from ultra-thin models with "perfect" features to making every woman feel positive about her looks.

Dove produced a series of online short films promoting the self-esteem fund.

Unilever, the company which owns the Dove brand, has been criticized on the grounds that Unilever also produces Fair and Lovely, a skin-lightening product marketed at dark-skinned women in several countries. Unilever also markets the Lynx's brand, which contradicts the sentiment of the Campaign for Real Beauty, by using traditional hot models in the advertising.

Unilever also owns and is responsible for the branding of their AXE brand of deodorants and body sprays, which uses hot chicks in skimpy outfits craving ordinary looking men after they apply the AXE product.

So we’re back asking the question – where does real beauty come from?

Unilever tried to show us our inner beauty, and that we’re all beautiful in some way, but eventually went back to the old tried and true standard of using fashion models.

Beauty comes from within – or does it?

 As a species, we are naturally attracted to others visually first. This goes back to our basic instincts – men look for women with full lips and hips, good teeth, hair, skin and nails, as a sign of someone who’s healthy and fit to produce off-spring. Tall dark and handsome also has some truth – it’s a sign to women that the guy is fit and will have good genes, and that the man can defend the cave (remember we’re talking basic instincts here) to protect the family.

Even our pheromones have been linked to our health – muscular, men smell better to women, according to more than a few studies. When compared to overweight men, socks worn by the fit men seemed less “stinky” than the unfit men to women who volunteered to participate in one study.

However, in today’s complex society, obviously there is more at play than how one smells. We all want to be surrounded by people that make us feel good.

No one wants to hang out with the neighborhood bully, or be forced to endure a night alone with someone that bores the hell out of them.

So true beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, as it depends on what each one of us needs in another to be happy and comfortable.

Maybe that’s true love really is blind?