Glamour is, rather, a form of nonverbal rhetoric, which moves and persuades not through words, but through images, concepts, and, totems. (Even when conjured as word-pictures, glamorous images are perceived and remembered as emotionally resonant snapshots, not verbal descriptions.)
Glamour is powerfully persuasive. Yet because it relies on imagery and channels desire, it is often dismissed as trivial, frivolous, and superficial.
the old Scots word glamour described a literal magic spell. Glamour (or a glamour) made its subject see things that weren't there. A 1721 glossary of poetry explained: "When devils, wizards or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to cast glamour o'er the eyes of the spectator." Glamour could, Scott wrote in 1805, "make a ladye seem a knight; / The cobwebs on a dungeon wall / Seem tapestry in lordly hall." That power was believed to stretch into the real world. In his diary, Scott worried that "a kind of glamour about me" was mking him overlook errors in his page proofs; he wondered whether the right herbal concoction "would dispel this fascination." (As both magic and metaphor, glamour and fascination are closely related.)
Glamour [...] emerges through the interaction between object and audience. Glamour is not something you possess but something you perceive, not something you have but something you feel.
Unlike escapist entertainment that simply provides emotional distraction, glamour is escapist in the profound sense identified by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Echoing Queen Christina's Antonio, Tuan argues that escapism is the essence of culture, which he defines as "the totality of means by which I escape from my animal state of being." This uniquely human escapism allows us to shape the world, and ourselves, through deliberate action.
A human is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is. Humans not only submit and adapt, as all animals do; they transform in accordance with a preconceived plan. That is, before transforming, they do something extraordinary, namely, "see" what is not there. Seeing what is not there lies at the foundation of all human culture.
A single static two-dimensional portrait – a selective representation "preserved for posterity" – is, by its very nature, deceptive. Viewers perceive such a portrait differently from a real human being. If, as [Jessica] Coen claims, young women do not realise that "most waists don't really bend without a roll of flesh" or that "a 40-year-old woman actually does have some wrinkles," it is because they've mentally edited away those flaws in the people they see every day. In the flux and movement of life, the mind overlooks imperfections that appear glaring in a still image. Retouching may therefore produce an image truer to the mind's eye.
