Beauty Salon

After 39 years of working as an insurance professional, Bob Johnson of the Bob Johnson Project, decided it was time for a change. Upon retiring, he traded in his ties for t-shirts and has worked with a designer to create a t-shirt line with a positive message.

While the t-shirt business is very different from the insurance industry, Johnson was not able to easily abandon 39 years of insurance jargon; it is part of who he is. He refers to the positive visual messages portrayed on his t-shirts as “policies” and the t-shirts itself as “coverage.”

The t-shirts are designed in vintage style and currently, six creative designs are available. They include: circus, hula hoop, origami, weightlifter, horse and butterfly.

Positive messages vary based on the design. For example, the circus has a message of “there is no limit to what you can do”; the Hula Hoop communicates that “you don’t need to be young to be youthful”; and the Butterfly message inspires people to “take time to enjoy the little things in life.”

“All t-shirts are designed to fit and feel like an old favorite,” Denise Plumb, t-shirt designer said. “They have all been washed several times, are pre-shrunk, and manufactured from 100 percent organic cotton; they are super soft and much like a t-shirt that has been loved for many years.”

Bob Johnson t-shirts are manufactured in the U.S. and are for sale on the Bob Johnson Project web site. Plans are currently underway to expand into other retail outlets. In the spring, expansion also includes adding short-sleeve t-shirts, men’s and possibly children’s designs to the line. Currently, only long-sleeve, women’s t-shirts are available.

“I bought one of each,” Kathlyn Horan of Atlanta, Ga. Said. “I only hope that Bob creates one more so I can wear a different one each day of the week.”

According to Bob, “change is good and it’s never too late.” He hopes that his clients will be inspired by these new polices and coverage. Each t-shirt comes with its own policy number so customers are covered for life.

Beauty is a characteristic of a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology and culture. As a cultural creation, beauty has been extremely commercialized.

An “ideal beauty” is a person who is admired, or possesses features widely attributed to beauty in a particular culture. A number of historical individuals have become icons of beauty - for example, women like Cleopatra VII, Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe.

The subjective experience of “beauty” often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in balance and harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is a common phrase that expresses this concept.

In its most profound sense, beauty may engender a salient experience of positive reflection about the meaning of one’s own existence. An “object of beauty” is anything that reveals or resonates with personal meaning.

Understanding the nature and meaning of beauty is one of the key themes in the philosophical discipline known as aesthetics. The composer and critic Robert Schumann distinguished between two kinds of beauty, natural and poetic. The former is found in the contemplation of nature, whereas the latter lies in man’s conscious, creative intervention into nature. Schumann indicated that in music, or other art, both kinds of beauty appear, but natural beauty is merely sensual delight. Poetic beauty begins where the natural beauty leaves off.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose aesthetic theory has been influential, noted that beauty seems to possess both subjective and objective qualities. Arguing for the subjective nature of beauty, he wrote, “The judgment of taste, therefore, is not a cognitive judgment, and so not logical, but is aesthetic – which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective.” Kant also noted, however, that when someone calls an object beautiful, “he judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and then speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things.”

A common idea suggests that beauty exists in the appearance of things and people that are good. A good apple will be perceived as more beautiful than a bruised one. Also, most people judge physically attractive human beings to be good, both physically and on a deeper level. Specifically, they are believed to possess a variety of positive traits and personality characteristics.

Further, people’s skills can develop and change their sense of beauty. Carpenters may view an out-of-true building as ugly, and many master carpenters can see out-of-true angles as small as half a degree. Many musicians can likewise hear as dissonant a tone that’s high or low by as little as two percent of the distance to the next note. Most people have similar aesthetics about the work or hobbies they have mastered.