Our ‘why’

By inviting people to reflect on their views on beauty, we contribute to their personal wellbeing and more sustainable consumption.

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.

The method

By asking a set of intriguing questions about beauty. The nature of the questions in the Project Beauty survey 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 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 social startup, based in Utrecht, Netherlands. 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 12,000 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 Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the United States 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.