Our ‘why’

The world is full of distractions and temptations. Sometimes it’s helpful to sit down and reflect on what’s really important in our lives.

Project Beauty aims to increase awareness about the social impact of the phenomenon of ‘beauty’ in general and about the personal experience of it in particular. It does this by presenting a series of intriguing questions about beauty. These questions are helpful. The answers reflect a person’s personal experience and opinion about beauty.

The method

The nature of the research is explorative: that is, there is no fixed definition of the term beauty: it is up to the participants to indicate what they mean by it.

The method used is an online survey. The questionnaire consists of more than 30 open and closed questions. In addition, participants are asked to illustrate their view of beauty with an image or a piece of music.

At the start

Project Beauty was started in the Netherlands by communication researcher Marius Hogendoorn. During a sabbatical in 2005, he read a book on beauty by the Irish poet-philosopher John O’Donohue. This inspired him to create a questionnaire on that subject that would later be described as ‘intriguing’ or even ‘mindblowing’. Project Beauty was born.

Organisation

Project Beauty is a Dutch social startup. Since the start is it has been able to grow and expand thanks to donations of a number of wonderful people and and some great organisations.

To develop the project further and take it to new countries we are always welcoming new supporters.

Scope

Since the inception of Project Beauty, more than 10,000 people have participated and expressed their views on this beautiful but sometimes complicated phenomenon known as ‘beauty’.

The survey has so far been conducted in seven countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Peru. The benchmarks have already been performed more often in the UK and the Netherlands.

Based on this, statements can now be made about the perception of beauty in countries with a collective population of more than 500 million. The blog Thoughts is published regularly about these general findings.