What is vanity?

Question

what is your view? x

Answer 1

Vanity is basically someone who is incredibly vein. They ALWAYS have to look in the mirror to make sure their appearance is perfect. They believe that they are the most beautiful creature on this earth and believe that others think the same way. If a hair is out of place, they freak. It's more of an obsessive compulsive disorder towards beauty.

Answer 2

Vanity is having a very high self confidence plus elegance. It is good. But sometime other people who have inferior complex and are jealous might not find it good for them and so they will create anything to bring you down. I've been a victim myself.

Answer 3

vanity is as vanity does, over and over and over again, usually in a mirror!

Answer 4

Vanity is the excessive belief in one's own abilities or attractiveness to others. In some religious teachings vanity is considered a form of self-idolatry, in which one rejects God for the sake of one's own image, and thereby becomes divorced from the graces of God. The stories of Lucifer and Narcissus (who gave us the term narcissism), and others, attend to a pernicious aspect of vanity.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that "vanity is the fear of appearing original: it is thus a lack of pride, but not necessarily a lack of originality."[1] One of Mason Cooley's aphorisms is "Vanity well fed is benevolent. Vanity hungry is spiteful."

The symbolism of vanity

In Western art, vanity was often symbolized by a peacock, and in Biblical terms, by the Whore of Babylon. In secular allegory, vanity was considered one of the minor vices. During the Renaissance, vanity was invariably represented as a naked woman, sometimes seated or reclining on a couch. She attends to her hair with comb and mirror. The mirror is sometimes held by a demon or a putto.

Other symbols of vanity include jewels, gold coins, a purse, and often by the figure of death himself. Often we find an inscription on a scroll that reads Omnia Vanitas ("All is Vanity"), a quote from the Book of Ecclesiastes.[1] "The artist invites us to pay lip-service to condemning her," writes Edwin Mullins, "while offering us full permission to drool over her. She admires herself in the glass, while we treat the picture that purports to incriminate her as another kind of glass—a window—through which we peer and secretly desire her."[2] The theme of the recumbent woman often merged artistically with the non-allegorical one of a reclining Venus.

In his table of the Seven Deadly Sins, Hieronymus Bosch depicts a bourgeois woman admiring herself in a mirror held up by a devil. Behind her is an open jewelry box. A painting attributed to Nicolas Tournier, which hangs in the Ashmolean Museum, is An Allegory of Justice and Vanity. A young woman holds a balance, symbolizing justice; she does not look at the mirror or the skull on the table before her.[3] Vermeer's famous painting Girl with a Pearl Earring is sometimes believed to depict the sin of vanity, as the young girl has adorned herself before a glass without further positive allegorical attributes. All is Vanity, by Charles Allan Gilbert (1873-1929), carries on this theme. An optical illusion, the painting depicts what appears to be a large grinning skull. Upon closer examination, it reveals itself to be a young woman gazing at her reflection in the mirror.

Such artistic works served to warn viewers of the ephemeral nature of youthful beauty, as well as the brevity of human life and the inevitability of death.

Answer 5

it is an excessive admiration of one's own appearance or achievements..
It is good to be vain at own's self sometimes.. like pampering your skin, its a way of making yourself look good and it adds confidence.
when you overdo it, that is when it becomes wrong..

Answer 6

the inability to look in the mirror without makeup

Answer 7

magnifying the importance of external beauty.

Answer 8

it's a desperate call of a person who needs attention and tenderness.

Answer 9

Didn't Prince do her?