On the beautiful

Edmund Burke, the famous philosopher, has formulated interesting notions of beauty and fo the sublime.
In our dagy and age, we crave beauty. Certainly, this obsession with physical perfection is not exclusively ours. We can think of the corsets, the ridiculous hairstyles, Chinese draping shoes... the list goes on and on.
So why do we crave beauty? Is it a simple sociological and ethnic configuration, or is there some ingrained belief we all have about beauty?
So I turn to Edmund Burke and his defition of beauty. "I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, (and there are many that do so,) they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them..." It's well known that beautiful people get more out of life than ugly people do. Sad, but a fact. I'll never forget that afternoon waiting in line at a coffee shop as an employee completely ignored an old woman, turning to the made-up blonde and asking her sweetly for her order. It's a rum deal.
Or think of Jane Eyre. She is small, plain, dowdy. She continually sees herself as an ugly and insignificant person. The fact that she is an ugly child serves only to reinforce unfair punishment.
So, what about beauty? All I am trying to say is that, in the end, it all fades. As Charles Ryder says in "Brideshead Revisited", "vanity, vanity, vanity. All is vanity". That blonde, one day, will go to a coffee shop as an old woman, and will be pushed aside by a younger version of herself.
True, beauty is important, and as Burke so cleverly puts it, entices us as human beings. All that we must remember, as a society, is that it cannot be the exclusive quality.