ABOUT US

Project Beauty

Project Beauty is a social start-up enterprise, etablished in Utrecht, Netherlands. Project Beauty aims to raise awareness about the societal impact of the phenomenon 'beauty' in general and about the personal experience of it in particular. It does this by presenting a set of intruiging questions about beauty, which function as a mirror that reflects ones personal experience with and opinion of beauty. The questions also have been asked to representative numbers of people in (so far) seven countries, thus creating a unique database with intriguing information about this wonderful but sometimes also complicated phenomenon.

At the start
The social enterprise was started in the Netherlands by a Dutch communication researcher. Marius Hogendoorn. After his side career in bodyfashion came to an unexpected ending, he took a time-out and created a survey that has been described as 'intrigueing' or even 'mindblowing'. The idea came to him after reading a book from the Irish poet philosopher John O'Donohue.

With a team of wonderful helpers and numerous generously supporting companies through the years Project Beauty has grown into a much appreciated to evaluate your personal views on beauty, as well as a leading source of information on how beauty can be perceived.


A reflective cultural survey
At the heart of Project Beauty is international research intoperceptions of beauty. The character of the study is exploratory, which means no definition of beauty was given to the participants: it was up to them to determine its meaning.

The research method used is web-survey. The questionnaire is contains than over 40 closed as well as open questions. In addition, participants were asked to illustrate their view of beauty with a picture or a piece of music.


Scope

Since the start of Project Beauty in 2007 now over 10.000 people participated and shared their viewson this wonderful but also sometimes complicated phenomenon called 'beauty'. The findings from Project Beauty are summarized in the 'Seeking Beauty' books and in regularly appearing blog texts.

So far, the survey been carried out in seven countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and recently also in Peru. In the UK and the Neterlands the benchmarks already have been replicated.