What is beauty?

Each of us today has our own idea of beauty, even though, in every era, certain standards emerge that define what is considered beautiful. Beauty can lie in proportions, colours, scents, a perfect face, or in its imperfections. Some find it in a sunset, others in a scene from a horror film.

Many philosophers have tried to define it.
For Socrates, beauty was what is useful, what serves a purpose. Aristotle linked it to harmony, order, and proportion. The ancient Greeks spoke of kalokagathìa, the union of beauty and goodness: a balance between outer appearance (kalòs) and inner moral virtue (agathòs).
For Saint Augustine, beauty was connected to God, the supreme source of order and perfection. Kant, on the other hand, believed that beauty is that which pleases universally and without interest, reflecting a “purposiveness without purpose.” Baudelaire described it as an ambiguous force —divine and infernal— capable of bringing both light and madness, joy and death.
Finally, Umberto Eco offered a more realistic view: “We speak of beauty when we enjoy something for what it is, independently of possessing it.”

In short, for the ancient philosophers, beauty was an objective value, bound to harmony and goodness. With Kant, it became a subjective experience, a universal and disinterested judgment of taste. Writers and poets like Baudelaire saw it as an inner force, an emotional power that transcends pure aesthetics.

My own view is closer to that of Charles Bukowski, the writer and poet, a controversial figure often considered one of the founders of dirty realism, a literary movement born in the U.S. in the 1970s and ’80s.
Though he never formally defined it, Bukowski found beauty in vulnerability and human imperfection, in raw, unfiltered reality. He celebrated it in simple, fleeting gestures: a cold beer in a bar, an honest conversation, light filtering through a dirty window.
For him, beauty was a form of inner freedom, the ability to find joy in spite of hardship. He often linked it to desire and sensuality, in a visceral, unidealised way. Even writing, for Bukowski, was an act of beauty: a way to give meaning to the chaos of existence.

From this vision comes 7030 Beauty Factor, born from my passion for a kind of beauty closer to Bukowski’s than to classical ideals.
A beauty I find in small, fleeting things: in a girl’s smile as she looks up from her phone, in the moonlight between trees, in the tilt of a dog’s head watching its owner, in beer foam spilling over the rim of a glass, or in a sudden gust of wind.
A beauty that exists beyond perfect symmetry, flawless skin, and postcard sunsets, but that is also all of these things, and everything that moves us.

I’ll end with a quote from Bukowski:
“There is nothing more beautiful than what is true.”