# What does ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ mean?

To “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” means to judgments of beauty are subjective. The modern form is 19th-century (Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, 1878); the underlying sentiment is much older and appears in classical writers.

## What it means

- The modern form is 19th-century (Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, 1878); the underlying sentiment is much older and appears in classical writers.

## Action steps

1. Common in taste and design debates.
2. Example: You may not like the painting, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

## Sources

- [Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898) — Internet Archive scan](https://archive.org/details/brewers-dictionary-of-phrase-and-fable)

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