Why does footballer Abbas Saad still command so much support even though he was found guilty of match-fixing?
I don't think it is only because of his nifty football skills, or that he helped Singapore win the Malaysia Cup last year. Neither do I believe his supporters suffer from a crooked sense of right or wrong.
In my mind, he attracts so much loyalty, at least from his women fans, for a simpler reason -- he is handsome. Or, in the parlance of his many teenage supporters, he is "so cute".
Whether one likes him or not, it is a fact that Abbas is a good-looker. He has the sort of strong, chiselled features and thick, black hair that many women find attractive in a man.
Couple that with his youth (he is 28), an athletic body, a certain swagger, and, well, a hero is formed.
To his fans, it is not important that he had helped fix a match. Just another look at those lushly-lashed eyes and much, if not everything, is forgotten.
Beauty forgives many things.
Take Fumihiro Joyu, the spokesman for the Aum Shinrikyo sect in Japan, who is reportedly the heart-throb of many young Japanese girls.
The organisation he speaks for has done devious deeds and harboured murderous intents. By association, he can't be a very nice or good man, can he?
But do these girls care? No, they just squeal about his boyish, clean-cut looks.
Then there is British actor Hugh Grant. He might have been involved in a lwed act with a prostitute and cheated on his lovely girlfriend. But just how many fans will be turned away from him because of that?
Just gaze again at his doleful eyes, the way his heavy fringe flops over his lean forehead, the curve of his lips, ever ready to curl into an awkward grin, and, oh, who cares about his sins?
As British novelist Evelyn Waugh once remarked, manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
Beauty was on parade during the Television Corporation of Singapore's Star Awards over Channel 8 last Sunday.
The event was ostensibly to celebrate Singapore's television talent. But I doubt many viewers were concerned with the stars' acting technique.
Rather, most of us tuned in because we wanted to ogle at the country's young and beautiful.
We were just interested in watching, and gossiping about people like Fann Wong, Zoe Tay, Li Nanxing and Chew Chor Meng. How did they look? What did they wear?
The Most Popular Female/Male Artiste titles went to Zoe and Chen Hanwei. The awards were based on public voting, which probably means that the couple most represent the sort of looks Singaporeans appreciate.
Is there an international standard of beauty?
Norms change, of course. The fair, ripely-rounded maidens of the late 19th century whom Renoir celebrated in his paintings -- "splendid fruit" was how he described them -- were once the epitome of beauty in the Western world.
But no more today, where leanness and muscles are desired.
But in terms of facial features, there appears to be a worldwide consensus on what constitutes good looks.
A survey of women at those Miss World/Universe contests reveals that an oval face, for instance, is regarded as ideal, whether in the United States or Japan, as are wide eyes, long lashes, a slim, high-bridged nose and full, shapely lips.
These are, of course, features which many East Asians do not possess, though this has not stopped them from trying.
I had a classmate in school with really small eyes, like that of Hongkong singer Sandy Lam.
My friend was a favourite with many male classmates, and I think her unusual eyes must have added to her attraction. At least, they made her stand out from the rest of us.
But she must have hated them, for as soon as she went to university, she had an operation which gave her double eyelids. The result: She looked prettier, from the conventional Western point of view. But now she also didn't look very different from us, and had lost her special mark.
I understand why she did it. I, too, went through a stage wanting double eyelids, and ended up cutting tiny strips of scotch-tape which I would gingerly attach on my lids to achieve that deep-set look.
When I reached my teens, those double lids somehow appeared naturally, and I didn't have to turn to what my friend did. But would I have done so if the sought-after lines didn't appear? I really don't know.
Can too much beauty be a bad thing? Who hasn't heard of beautiful women complaining, tiresomely, how they are not taken seriously. But men apparently share thse woes.
I have a friend who is truly good-looking. He has muscles, perfect features, great dress sense plus an appealing air of distraction.
His appearance cause women, and men, to make double takes. But the women in his life feel insecure about him, while others around him often find it hard to see the person beyond the beauty.
I suppose -- and this could, of course, be sour grapes -- that beauty can be a burden.
There is a story by American writer Jean Stafford. She was no stranger to the angst some people feel over their appearance, as hers was ruined after she and her husband, poet Robert Lowell, met with a car accident.
The End Of A Career tells the tale of Angelica Early, a woman who was "a nymph in her cradle ... and in her silvery coffin she was a goddess".
Angelica's beauty gave her a "shimmering international fame" and she was feted wherever she went.
But her face was not so much a gift from the gods as a result of painstaking care.
"At night she wore mud on her face and creamed gloves on her hands; her hair was treated with olive oil, lemon juice, egg white, and bear; she was massaged, she was vibrated, she was steamed into lassitude and then stung back to life by astringents; she was brushed and creamed and salted and powdered."
But she could not escape "the arch-fiend Time".
While her face was still beautiful, her hands began to reveal her age. "The veins had grown too vivid and ... here and there in the interstices of the blue-green, upraised, network there had appeared pale freckles, which darkened and broadened and multiplied; the skin was still silken and ivory, but it was redundant and lay too loosely on her fingers."
Angelica believed that "if I lose my looks, I'm lost".
Ashamed of her hands, she retreated from society to mourn. And when a concerned aunt came for a visit and presented her with, by ill-chance, a handsome pair of crocheted gloves, Angelica died -- "her heart, past mending, had stopped".
It is just a story, of course, though a cautionary tale.
Still, considering the burden beautiful people must surely shoulder, I really wouldn't mind looking like Fann or Zoe -- would you?