We’re in a moment of cultural fascination with looksmaxxers. That too-online community, made up mostly of men who claim to do things like hit themselves in the face with hammers for a stronger jawline and snort meth for leaner bodies, has become the object of shocked trend pieces and news coverage.
Looksmaxxers are fascinating in part because their motivations are so understandable. They have observed the simple fact that in our culture, life is easier for people who are beautiful, and they have made their plans accordingly, self-mutilation and hard drugs and all. The calculus feels both horrifying and comprehensible, which is why I found it so startling and exciting to find people moving in the other direction in the form of two new memoirs by authors who both call themselves ugly and have no plans to change their appearances.
“I am an ugly woman,” begins journalist Stephanie Fairyington in Ugly, forthcoming in May. “At fourteen I learned fourteen times over that I’m ugly,” writes the poet and artist Moshtari Hilal in Ugliness, published last year.
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These memoirists are essentially performing the same calculation the looksmaxxers have: Life is easier when you are beautiful, and I am not naturally a person whom others consider beautiful. But rather than reach for the hammer or the needle, both Hilal and Fairyington have chosen to explore the culture instead.
In each memoir, Fairyington and Hilal navigate what they think about ugliness: to what extent their own ugliness is a product of their own insecurities and to what extent it is objective truth; whether any sort of objective truth around human beauty is even possible; and the millennia of racism and misogyny that have defined our shared sense of ugliness. They consider whether there is value to be had in calling themselves ugly and deciding not to care what anyone else thinks about that, or whether embracing such a label would be an act of self-hatred.
“I cannot reconcile myself to ugliness through aesthetics and verse alone,” Hilal frets, after devoting pages of poetry and photographs to the nose she feels is too big for her face. “It feels too tender to admit that our beauty or lack thereof impacts, even shapes, our lives,” writes Fairyington.
As I read these books, I wasn’t always sure the authors had things figured out that much more than the looksmaxxers did. The malice in the word ugliness is hard to neutralize, to the point that an attempt at reclamation can sometimes seem like self-loathing. Indeed, I found myself feeling defensive on the part of both authors, compelled to look up an author photo and fact-check their claims about themselves. “Not ugly at all!” I declared both times, after I was presented with an image of a perfectly normal-looking woman.
Yet Fairyington, at least, makes it clear she doesn’t appreciate such compliments. She notes that any time she describes herself as ugly, people (especially women) interrupt her and assure her that she isn’t.
“Women can’t let a thought like that hang in the air without vigorously swatting it away because it’s the fate they’re chronically trained (and trying) to avoid; it’s very nearly the worst thought to think of oneself,” Fairyington writes. She thinks trying to avoid the word, however, is a mistake: it means depriving her of the words she needs to describe the way she walks through the world.
To call someone ugly feels so malicious, so aggressive. But these memoirists and the looksmaxxers appear to agree on at least one thing: people really are treated badly by the world if they are not as conventionally attractive as their peers.
To deny someone the language to name their own reality feels perverse. And yet ugly feels like such a cruel word. The provocative and never-quite-answered question of these memoirs is whether turning it on yourself can become an act of self-love.
Accusations of ugliness come from the outside first. Both Hilal and Fairyington write that they were called ugly as children, either by family members, authority figures, or other kids. Crucially, the first qualities that other people told them were ugly were the signs of their otherness. For Hilal, that is race, and for Fairyington, it is signs of queerness. Their families, in an attempt to care for them, continually pressure them to erase their otherness and make themselves normatively beautiful.
Hilal is an Afghan-born woman living in Germany (her book is nicely translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer), and it is the parts of her features that are specifically Arabic that she is taught to think of as ugly: her long nose, her dark body hair. Tending to both becomes a family affair. Her aunt tells her to start bleaching her facial hair, and her sister shows her how to manage the pain from the burn of the chemical cream. Her older sisters, who all have the same family nose, all get rhinoplasties, one after the other, much to their father’s approval.
Fairyington is a butch lesbian, and it is her refusal to present as a femme that she sees as marking her as ugly. “It looks like an active and hostile repudiation of what I, as a woman, am called upon, daily, to do,” she writes — to do the work necessary to be seen as attractive to men.
As a child, Fairyington recalls, her mother’s friends were baffled by her tomboyish energy. “That’s Chyrsi’s daughter?” one says contemptuously. “It wasn’t just my face that made me unattractive to her,” Fairington writes, “it was also the legibility of my queerness.” Fairyington felt like a boy, but on her, the trappings of little boyhood — “mismatched dirty clothes, bad haircuts, and smears of pizza grease lining the sides of their goofy smiles” — became wrong, incongruous, ugly.
The history between race, gender, and technologies and philosophies of beauty is long and intimate. Both Hilal and Fairyington take their time delving into it, and it’s this history that begins to make ugliness start to fall apart as a category in their minds. It becomes historically contingent, all its gruesome political biases showing through. If an aesthetic system tells you that people of color and queer people are inherently ugly — well, what is that system really worth living by?
One of Hilal’s long rabbit holes leads her into the history of plastic surgery — which doubles, she shows, as the history of doctors trying to make racial differences disappear. One 19th-century American surgeon developed an early nose job designed to turn the “Irish noses” on the faces of a new wave of immigrants into the more anglicized “American nose.” And in the 1930s, the German Jewish inventor of the modern rhinoplasty offered discounts to those with “Jewish noses” who wanted to be able to pass.
Hilal explores the way early researchers of mental illness and criminality became obsessed with the idea that looks and temperament were linked. In the 19th century, she writes, researchers found that all the patients in a given mental hospital had asymmetrical faces and decided it must mean that facial asymmetry is a marker of insanity. (In reality, all human faces are asymmetrical, but the researchers somehow failed to notice that.) Around the same time, the notorious Italian physician Cesare Lombroso developed a theory that criminality is written upon the face. In his view, thieves have bushy eyebrows and thin beards, while rapists have delicate features with swollen lips and eyelids.
“It’s no wonder these descriptions are familiar,” Hilal writes. “We still see them today in depictions, caricatures, and costumes of bad guys in books and film and elsewhere, all of which contribute to our notions of embodied evil. We know the criminal Lombroso invented before we ever came into contact with criminality.”
Fairyington, proving Hilal’s point, cites a recent study showing that people are more likely to believe those with “ugly faces” have acted immorally. This is the kind of study that becomes catnip to the looksmaxxers, who are always claiming that their Lombroso-like obsession with facial symmetry is grounded in real science. But Hilal and Fairyington return to some core questions: Who taught us what ugliness looks like? Who linked that to immorality and evil? And what agenda did those people have?
Jessica DeFino, a journalist and vocal critic of the beauty industry, frequently remarks that when it comes to beauty, Americans have a Disney movie’s sense of morality. We congratulate celebrities we like for “aging well” because they are “unproblematic,” while we react to images of wrinkled and racist politicians by saying that hatred makes you “age horribly.” She argues that we should see this tendency for what it really is: a continuation of the thinking of those 19th-century doctors or even going back earlier, to the ancient world. “The ancient Greeks,” she points out, “used the same word, kalos” to describe both “inner goodness and outer beauty.”
Surely those who are ugly are those who have displeased the gods, who have sinned. Surely to be beautiful is to exist correctly in the world, to be pure of heart.
Hilal writes that when she began to draw portraits as part of her artistic practice, she was drawn to faces that “resembled those of the evil stepmother, strict headmistress, frigid secretary, wicked witch or sneaky and stingy neighbor.” They were also familiar faces, she writes: “They also resembled me. I had never met anyone who both occupied these roles and looked like me, yet I felt I knew these characters better than I knew myself. I wasn’t cunning or cruel, but when I smiled in the mirror, I saw them there, all those mean women.”
For both Hilal and Fairyington, being called ugly by another person distances them from their bodies and their loved ones.
Hilal writes that being labeled ugly makes her imagine herself in another, more acceptable body. “I call this idealized person ‘the other woman,’ a woman with whom I’m cheating on myself,” she writes, “whenever I secretly promise her a better life than the one promised to the self and body I’m actually spending my time with.”
Fairyington’s view of her own appearance becomes a barrier between herself and her conventionally attractive daughter, who she fears might love her less because she’s not beautiful. She describes being overcome with fear when her daughter tickles her feet, which Fairyington has always considered her ugliest part. “The idea of you seeing them in close proximity, or worse, handling them—dry, calloused, malformed—felt too vulnerable, like it would make me less lovable to you. Ugly,” she writes.
Most of us have experienced similar thoughts in our lives: It’s the rare and confident soul who doesn’t ever hear a little voice in their head call them ugly. The conventional advice at this point is to try to find beauty in yourself as you exist now, and to dismiss the limited beautiful/ugly binary of Greek statues. Both Fairyington and Hilal play with such possibilities, and sometimes they work. But they don’t always.
Fairyington writes that after she came out at age 19, she felt “desirable — if not attractive — for the first time ever” as she learned that the masculinity that made her ugly to her mothers’ friends made her appealing to other queer women. Studying queer theory in college opened her mind further to the possibilities of moving beyond conventional beauty ideas. “I could even cultivate ‘ugly’ like some girls cultivate ‘pretty,” she writes in excitement, “or fuse the two in some startling and unexpected way, or transcend both.” She started to wear flip flops year-round, “to intentionally expose my ugly feet.”
Yet transcendence proves difficult, as Fairyington’s optimism about the possibilities of what she calls her “radical ugliness” is always tempered with that “tenderness” — the insecurity about her looks below the surface bravado and pleasure in queer aesthetics. She shifts back and forth ambivalently over whether her ugliness is a badge of pride she is embracing or a neutral truth she must stare in the face.
In one section, she quotes Thomas J. Spiegel’s 2022 paper on “lookism,” which argues that society’s prejudice against the ugly should be disrupted like any other form of prejudice. Spiegel asserts that we should recognize ugly people as a marginalized social group, but we are unable to do so, because it feels so mean to call someone else ugly, or to let them call themselves that. “Our next-level liberation depends upon our ability to manage the fragile and fraught embarrassment in openly admitting the ways our culturally informed plainness or prettiness impact our lives,” Fairyington declares.
That “fragile and fraught embarrassment” can cut deep. When she and her partner, Sabrina, begin talking about having a baby, Fairyington overhears one of her friends say that Sabrina should be the genetic mother, because she’s the pretty one, and Fairyington doesn’t disagree: She doesn’t want to inflict her face on an innocent child. She vacillates between worrying that her pretty daughter will dislike her for her ugliness, or that her daughter is too focused on conventional expressions of beauty.
When Sabrina takes their 8-year-old to get her nails done, Fairyington protests that they’re teaching her to objectify herself too young. When she sees her daughter pine over the rhinestone-covered dresses worn by a group of drag queens, Fairyington writes knowingly, “What you don’t yet understand is that it’s not subversive when you do it; it’s submission.” The pleasures of self adornment are, for her, never about self-expression or the play of color and texture and form. They are inextricably tied to making oneself small in order to please other people — just as, in this book, her own radical ugliness is tied both to an intoxicating self-expression, a grim social disadvantage, and the intimate horror of displeasing the people she loves.
Meanwhile, Hilal describes being called “horseface” at 14, and, in horror, trying to throw out that year’s school pictures. Her mother rescues the pictures, and in the poem that opens Ugliness, Hilal looks at them again for the first time in decades, only to find the old sense of her own ugliness has vanished. She writes:
I search in vain
for an ugly horseface.
All I find is the picture of a child
flashing her teeth,
smiling for what will be the last time
in fourteen years.
Yet at the end of the book, Hilal is startled to glance at a recent photo of herself, from a day she felt happy and energetic, and find that she looks sad and tired and old. All her old teenage insecurities come rushing back — all her historiography and post-colonial analysis be damned. “Have I not learned anything?” she demands, betrayed by both her mind and her body. “How could my face fade on me like that, after I worked so hard getting to know and love it?” Aging is bringing new challenges to her project. The most difficult form of ugliness to confront, she realizes, is that of an old or sick body, which reminds us all of our own mortality and summons fear and disgust.
Hilal concludes with some shame that much of her project has been about trying to find a way “into the realm of beauty” through “ethical arguments and aesthetic drawings.” She thought, she writes, “I might convince others, and maybe even myself, that I’m beautiful too.” What she finds more productive, in the end, is the work of the writer and advocate Mia Mingus, who calls for a shift “from a politic of desirability and beauty to a politic of ugly and magnificence.”
Mingus’s magnificent bodies are bodies that are non-normative: “The magnificence of a body that shakes, spills out, takes up space, needs help, moseys, slinks, limps, drools, rocks, curls over on itself.” It is this framework that pushes Hilal to want to reconcile herself to the idea of ugliness, which acknowledges the human, fleshy frailty of bodies in a way that beauty cannot.
“I learned to respect ugliness: as an enduring reflection, not just of myself in the mirror, but of our humanness,” Hilal writes. “Ugliness alone reflects a truth that transcends images and words in bearing witness to the vulnerability of human life and the organic limits of the many abstract, general ideals imposed on us.”
Part of the project of the looksmaxxers is to try to contain the messy realities and limitations of our human bodies, and instead to embody the beauty ideal at its most Western, hypermasculine, and antiseptic. They strive for inhuman symmetry, for straight Greek noses and cut-glass jaws, for physiques that allow no possibilities of androgyny or gender play, no hints of weakness or vulnerability. They push toward that ideal with such deliberate violence and disregard for safety that it is as though they believe that their new, “beautiful” bodies will never die.
Trying to embrace ugliness instead is a fraught concept, riddled with possibilities for self-loathing and self-deception. But at the very least, as Hilal shows us, a body that is reconciled to ugliness is a body that knows it will die someday. It is an honest body — and isn’t there something beautiful in that?
