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A new book explores the benefits of accepting ugliness instead of trying to change it.
Humans learn early what is attractive, and some people spend their life trying to achieve that standard. They watch as, in pursuit of a strong jawline and social-media fame, one young man repeatedly taps his face with a hammer, or as an already thin celebrity goes on a crash diet in order to fit into a famous dead woman’s dress for a few minutes. Americans pay for makeup and hair removal, blowouts and manicures, personal trainers and facials, botulinum toxins injected into muscles and synthetic hyaluronic acid to plump lips—collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to achieve the look they want, or at least the look they think they should have.
This isn’t driven just by vanity: According to research, aesthetically pleasing people are generally more economically successful, and appearance-based discrimination incurs measurable economic costs. Beauty is historically tangled up with notions of morality, cleanliness, and fitness to lead. Being beautiful opens doors socially, too; a person’s actual qualities and abilities may be bolstered by what psychologists call an “attractiveness halo” effect, and such treatment can lead to beautiful people having a more optimistic outlook on life.
Good looks and their benefits are widely known and openly discussed, but there’s far less talk about the experience of not being attractive. In 2022, the philosopher Thomas J. Spiegel wrote about the uncomfortable reality that discrimination based on looks is a kind of injustice, one with both psychological and material consequences. The writer Stephanie Fairyington has been thinking about Spiegel’s work, and the concept of attractiveness, for a long time. What, and who, is it all supposed to be for, anyway? What is it meant to achieve?
Good looks and their benefits are widely known and openly discussed, but there’s far less talk about the experience of not being attractive. In 2022, the philosopher Thomas J. Spiegel wrote about the uncomfortable reality that discrimination based on looks is a kind of injustice, one with both psychological and material consequences. The writer Stephanie Fairyington has been thinking about Spiegel’s work, and the concept of attractiveness, for a long time. What, and who, is it all supposed to be for, anyway? What is it meant to achieve?
In her new book, Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter, Fairyington investigates why physical beauty—as defined by subjective standards that have shifted over time and still vary widely among cultures and generations—is so highly valued. And she begins it by admitting that she is ugly. Not “in a way that would elicit mouth-gaping stares,” she clarifies; she’s just “bland, offensively so, like a person who’s given up or doesn’t try.” But even hinting at this fact without self-deprecation upsets people around her, especially women, who “can’t let a thought like that hang in the air.” Accepting and naming ugliness is sacrilegious, “very nearly the worst thought to think of oneself,” she writes. Not everyone can be conventionally beautiful, of course, but these reactions imply that the real sin is to leave one’s looks alone rather than taking advantage of all of the available interventions—all of the ways a person can fix themselves.
What is a self-proclaimed ugly woman to do? And, more urgent, how is Fairyington to raise her traditionally good-looking tween daughter in a world that will teach her to value, nurture, and improve those looks at the cost of pursuing other desires? Ugly, which is addressed to an older, future version of her child, is dedicated to trying to answer that question. The book is both a philosophical text and a mother’s lament as she tries to imagine a new world in which physical beauty is no longer something worth focusing on.
Fairyington is not naive enough to think we can simply ignore looks. Human beings are social creatures, and so of course we understand ourselves in relation to others. It makes sense that among a group of friends, say, we might recognize who is shorter and who is taller, who is thinner and who is fatter, just as we would acknowledge that some of us enjoy opera while others prefer video games. The trouble, she points out, is that most people don’t perceive these facts to be just interesting variations; instead, they’re evaluative, tied to dichotomies such as good or bad, hot or not. She’s also not saying that we should be challenging beauty norms only by brazenly celebrating what is considered ugly as beautiful. She does explore that resistance through figures such as the English musician Poly Styrene and the drag queen Fauxnique, and she acknowledges the creative, playful, powerful effects of emphasizing features that we’re taught to downplay. But embracing a spectacle of ugliness can be just as labor intensive as chasing unattainable ideals of beauty—and can affirm what is considered attractive.
The author vividly remembers what it was like to care about her looks as a tomboyish kid who never lived up to the standards other people had for her, which felt especially painful because of how beautiful her mother was. When Fairyington was 10, an adult contemptuously asked, “That’sChrysí’s daughter?” Fairyington hopes to spare her child from going through the same thing. Hopes is the key word: Ugly is an aspirational book, an attempt to explore how else we might live inside our body and with one another. It represents a parent’s attempt to remake society into a welcoming place for her child—or, failing that, to make her child into the kind of person who can see past society’s most damaging messages. This tension—between working toward a better world and arming her child against the one we have—leads to some of the book’s most interesting and difficult moments.
When their daughter wants to include her love of shopping in a bio set to appear under a poem she wrote, Fairyington and her wife initially discourage it, dismissing shopping as a vapid pursuit. When the author learns that her wife and a family friend are planning trips to take her child to the nail salon, she disapproves: “Why are we encouraging her self-objectification so early?” she asks, to which the friend responds, “You don’t hate women, do you, Steph?”
It’s a joke, but one with bite. Fairyington is belittling the leisure activities of a significant part of the female population, and that attitude doesn’t exist in a vacuum—woman-coded cultural touchstones such as Taylor Swift, romance novels, and reality TV are often viewed as somewhat silly, whereas typically masculine entertainment, such as sports and historical war dramas, is more often treated with gravity. Yet Fairyington doesn’t wish to categorically denigrate the feminine; she grew up admiring subversive feminist subcultures such as the Riot Grrrl punk movement, and she wishes only that her daughter would consider other models of girlhood. Fairyington feels constrained by a culture in which women are constantly pushed to “morph our bodies and faces” to remain desirable (which, she notes, mostly means desirable to men). In her view, nail polish, makeup, and personal grooming are all part of this ongoing racket.
I don’t disagree with her claim at its core. Still, I do think that, as the online adage goes, people are allowed to enjoy things. What makes us feel good isn’t always good for us. Untangling why we like what we like is a lifelong project. And at the same time that Fairyington criticizes her kid’s interests, she also admits her own hypocrisy: She takes pride in how legible her daughter’s beauty is to others. “When I walk down the street with you,” she writes, “and see admiring smiles, like the flashes on paparazzi cameras, flickering at you with reflexive approval, I think, I may be a failed woman, but just look at my beautiful—and exceedingly normal—daughter.”
Even though being typically feminine comes with obvious rewards, Fairyington recognizes that her child isn’t—consciously, at least—trying to appeal to anyone but herself. She happens to like wearing nail polish. She likes a lot of things: admiring the outrageous outfits donned by drag queens in Provincetown, going to her parkour class, attempting witchcraft rituals under the light of a full moon, boys. She, like any other kid, is both similar to and different from her mothers, and Fairyington knows that her interests and personality will continue to change. All Fairyington can do now is provide alternatives.
Between her more analytical and philosophical passages, Fairyington transcribes mundane conversations with her child. In one scene, her daughter banishes a carefully planned outfit to her Halloween-costume bin after a classmate makes fun of it, and Fairyington can only watch sadly as someone else’s opinion influences her kid’s preferences. In other scenes, Fairyington tries to have her daughter think about things in new ways: She asks her what she likes about what her body can do, as opposed to what it looks like, and her daughter responds that she loves that her body can swim, make bracelets, dance, sing, climb trees, and play video games.
Ugly ends with an unlikely turn toward wonder and awe—feelings that can, according to researchers, help quiet the self-criticism and displeasure that seeps into our lives amid constant reminders of what we need to do to fix ourselves. It’s a good place to end the book, an invitation to her child—and to readers—to see our own smallness and find comfort, rather than despair, in the insignificance of many of our worries.
But I can’t help returning repeatedly to Fairyington’s assessment of her face early in the book. Giving up, or not trying, feels to me like a powerful kind of transgression. Beauty and wellness companies make billions off our attempts to control our appearance—but simply accepting what we look like circumvents the entire preoccupation. Some of us will always be naturally prettier, and some uglier; there’s never been a level playing field. But how much space might be freed up for other endeavors if those of us who find the whole thing exhausting just … took our attention elsewhere?
I found out in a small way a few years ago, when I stopped shaving my legs and underarms. At first, yes, it was partially a middle finger to what was expected of me. It didn’t solve my insecurities; I still felt self-conscious and on display, like the ugliest person in any room. Then I realized I’d pretty much always felt that way, regardless of the effort I put in. Once I stopped—except, in rare situations, to please myself or survive in work settings—I was free of the constant sense of having failed. Ironically, moving to Los Angeles, where professionally pretty people abound, liberated me further; there’s no way I can measure up here. Instead of trying to, I appreciate the beauty around me—L.A.’s golden light, the hills and mountains and ocean, the mysterious and hilarious vanity plates—and spend my time on other things, such as reading, writing, raising my child, and trying to make a living.
Small, individual choices like mine won’t magically bring about societal change, but they can open the door to finding out what actually delights us—what brings us joy and satisfaction. I know people who genuinely enjoy their aesthetic upkeep, who find going to the hair salon relaxing, and whose skin-care routine is a way to take pleasure in their own body. If doing any of this felt good to me, I’d do it—although, as Fairyington notes, it might still be useful to question why I found it pleasurable. But I don’t, and so trying to look beautiful feels like a chore, another thing to add to my long to-do list. There’s relief in putting my own aesthetic dissatisfaction aside and worrying, instead, about the far more urgent forms of ugliness in the world.
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