Beauty is important (but not, I think, good) in that it is a standard that many people aspire to. It is a multi-billion dollar industry in this country as well as many others, and it shapes our eating, exercise, hygenic, shopping, and other habits. Modern media has become instrumental in spreading and indeed creating standards of beauty. It is only human to want to conform to social standards, and it is nothing new. I recently learned that archaeological digs in Mississippian-era Indian sites have revealed that young women who seem to have been human sacrifices all had very similar facial and body proportions, suggesting that ancient peoples valued a certain kind of beauty as well (so much, apparently, that they deemed them worthy sacrifices.) What makes today's obsession with physical beauty so unique is the ubiquity of the images that shape our concepts of beauty..