What Is Beauty? On Surprise, Elegance, and Why Good Taste Is Not a Privilege
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There are some things you just can't ignore.
Not because they are large. Not because they are loud. But because there is something about them that captures the eye—a perfect balance of proportions. A surface that reveals more than its mere material composition. A form that seems as though it could never have been any other way.
What happens in that moment is what we call an experience of beauty. But what triggers it is harder to pin down than the word suggests.
Can true beauty be defined?
American designer and strategic thinker Marty Neumeier has defined beauty with a precision that is rare: as a quality of wholeness or harmony that generates joy, meaning, or satisfaction.
What immediately stands out is that beauty is not a quality of the object alone. It arises from the encounter between the object and the viewer. It is an event, not a substance.
Neumeier identifies three components without which true beauty cannot arise:
1) Surprise
Anthropologist Carolyn Bloomer defines beauty as “optimal completion”: the state in which an object appears so perfect that one cannot imagine anything better.
A piece of jewelry that achieves optimal completion needs no explanation. It asks no questions. It simply lies there—or on the body—and seems as though it has always been there.
RETINA® jewelry strives to achieve exactly that.
The Retina pattern itself is organic, meaning it emerged according to formal rules that no human invented. Its translation into metal through handcrafted work is committed to the principle of elegance: no superfluous gesture, no decorative element that is not part of the original. And the surprise lies in the mystery itself—in the moment when someone understands what they are seeing.
No louder than necessary. But deeper than expected.
Would you like to surprise someone very special?
2) Rightness
Rightness is not perfection in the geometric sense, but rather coherence—the alignment of an object with its purpose. Furniture designer Charles Eames called it “way-it-should-be-ness”—the feeling that a thing could not be any different from what it is. Not perfect in the mathematical sense, but in harmony with its purpose and its surroundings.
A carafe that drips when pouring has failed to achieve correctness—regardless of its shape. A ring that feels good and carries true meaning has achieved correctness.
Correctness is the reason why some things still work years later, while others, which looked beautiful when purchased, wear out after a short time.
3) Elegance
The most commonly misunderstood of the three principles.
Elegance does not mean luxury. It does not mean excess. It does not mean the most expensive version of something.
Elegance means the opposite: the rejection of the superfluous. The minimum number of elements needed for the whole to serve its purpose. Nothing is missing. Nothing is too much.
By this definition, an elegant dress is not the most elaborate, but the simplest one that fully serves its purpose. An elegant sentence contains not a single word too many. An elegant piece of jewelry has nothing that could be removed without losing something essential.
When accuracy and elegance are lacking, the result is what Neumeier calls kitsch: surprise without substance. Objects that are briefly appealing and then end up in the basement because their original appeal has faded. Kitsch can certainly have charm—but it doesn’t last long.
Beauty is therefore neither a matter of chance nor a privilege of talent. It is the convergence of three conditions that are mutually dependent. If one is missing, the result falls short of what could have been.
The Secret to Good Taste
Many people believe that good taste is innate—a talent you either have or don’t have.
That’s not true—and it’s an important distinction.
Good taste is, in a sense, based on education. Not in the sense of institutions or degrees, but in the original sense: something that arises through attention and engagement.
The psychologist Howard Gardner describes it this way: All young people develop aesthetic preferences. But only those who are exposed to a wide range of artworks, who observe how they are created, who understand something about the people behind them—and who engage in thoughtful discussions about craftsmanship and taste—are likely to develop an aesthetic sensibility that goes beyond the popular trends of the moment.
Good taste, according to Gardner, is learned through conscious effort.
That sounds demanding. But above all, it’s an invitation.
Anyone who begins to view objects not just based on first impressions, but according to their formal qualities, opens themselves up to a different kind of experience. You begin to see why some things endure and others do not. Why some spaces bring a sense of calm while others make you feel restless, without being able to say why. Why some pieces of jewelry still have the same impact after twenty years as they did on the very first day.
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RETINA® Jewelry, Rightness and Elegance
The rightness stems from the same idea. Valuable jewelry, in an intangible sense, carries meaning within itself. It is not decoration for its own sake. The RETINA®Code brings the innermost essence to the surface without distorting it. It adds nothing foreign to the object; it simply reveals what is already there. This is way-it-should-be-ness in its purest form.
Ultimately, elegance lies in the form itself: branching, organic lines that contain no superfluous gestures. No added ornamentation, no symbolic assertion coming from the outside. Only the pattern, in gold. And within it lies a stillness that cannot be found in a fingerprint nor sought in a coordinate.
Personalization alone does not create beauty. It creates meaning. But when personalization stems from an internal factor that can neither be copied nor repeated, something else emerges: a form of association that activates Neumeier’s strongest defining characteristic of beauty, while simultaneously fulfilling the conditions that ensure this beauty does not fade once the initial surprise has passed.