Will being ‘ugly’ be aspirational one day?

“I have a theory, in like ten years, being a little ugly and a little wrinkly is going to be in fashion,” says Ash Powers in a TikTok video. In the next ten to 15 years, she explains, when everyone has succumbed to smoothing and tweaking their faces, “we are going to look at someone who has never had any work done and say, ‘Oh my god her crows feet… she just looks so… expressive. It’s so beautiful.’” With over 2.8 million views and 490,000 likes at time of writing, this video has kickstarted a conversation about our fascination with rarity, the future of beauty, and the role we play in setting these standards – or eschewing them entirely.

Today people are able to artificially customise and contort themselves to fit the dominant beauty standards more than ever before. Body and face modification isn’t a new concept by any means. However, the technology we have and the lengths people go in order to achieve what is considered beautiful is more serious these days: plastic surgery, filler, injections of toxins, threads under the skin, appetite-suppressing pills, veneers, fat removal. All of this done in the name of a singular beauty ideal that reigns supreme. “It’s youth-focused, makes everyone look ethnically ambiguous, homogenised, and is based on beauty created by cosmetic surgery,” sums up Anita Bhagwandas, beauty journalist and author of Ugly.

Thanks to our visuals-centric culture, the expectation to be flawless has grown exponentially in recent years leading to more people going to extreme lengths to achieve it. “There is a lot of pressure on individuals to conform to a specific aesthetic,” says Nichelle Temple, esthetician and founder of Inderma Studio. “This can lead to unrealistic expectations, adverse results and self-esteem issues. Chasing an unrealistic notion of perfection can harm us.” Could it be, however, that the tides might be turning?

At first, the popularity of injectables and other cosmetic procedures gave many a sense of ‘empowerment’ (a concept often confused with ‘confidence’). Exercising agency over one’s body by changing and editing it seemed innocent enough, but now that the fog of excitement has cleared, it’s undeniable that nature-defying BBLs, big lips and busty breasts serve one thing: the male gaze. “It’s almost like you need to have these features or you’re considered ‘mid,’” TikToker Teresa Violet tells me. In a video captioned, “being ugly is so back”, Violet explains how desperate she is to move away from the current beauty ideal. “I think to an extent we’ll always value beauty but I think we can move away from valuing one specific type of it.”

This is something Julia Fox has long been calling for. “I often find myself gravitating toward faces that show little to no work done on them. Like older women not covering their ageing skin or their smile lines, which I think are gorgeous and indicative of a life truly lived. I also love the patterns that stretch marks leave on the skin,” she tells Dazed in an interview for this article. Fox has been advocating for “ugly” beauty for the last few years, preaching about embracing ageing, taking a break from Botox, and even using bleached eyebrows as “man repellent”. “It’s not actually ugly that’s coming back in style, but it’s what men would consider to be ugly that will be in,” she continues. “I’m not willing to shoulder that labour for men anymore. They don’t do anything for us. Why should we look pretty for them? They’re not the rulers of what’s attractive anymore.”

It’s not just the male gaze alone that is driving today’s beauty standards, however, says beauty critic Jessica Defino, but rather it’s the two-headed monster of the male gaze and what she calls the ‘sale gaze’. “If the male gaze is the condition of living under patriarchy, the sale gaze is the condition of living under capitalism and in a consumer society. A lot of today’s standards of beauty would not be possible, even on the most naturally ‘beautiful’ people, without significant product and procedure intervention.” Product intervention is at the forefront of how we present ourselves now, whether that’s through “glazed donut skin”, super skinny brows or a BBL. Achieving these looks requires specific tools, products, time and, crucially, money – participating in this beauty labour comes at a cost.

Part of what makes anything desirable is rarity and exclusivity, and this plays into our current standard of beauty: it’s there for the taking but only if you have the bank balance to back it up (“I’m not ugly, I’m just poor” as the meme goes). For a long time, plastic surgery was expensive and therefore out of reach for many people. If you had a BBL it didn’t just signify beauty, it also said something about your proximity to the elite. Now that these procedures have become more financially accessible – whether that’s by scoring a deal on Groupon or by flying to Turkey – the aesthetic is no longer a status symbol. After all, wealthy women won’t want to look like all the girls on the high street who have been botched with cheap filler and haphazardly placed Botox.

Beauty by design is rare. And if we’re to look at beauty through the lens of hierarchy and capitalism, not everyone can be beautiful. “Once it’s considered too accessible to the general population to have these cosmetic enhancements, there has to be something else that the elite use to differentiate themselves,” as Violet says. Trends come in cycles precisely because when something becomes saturated into the mainstream it stops being desirable. If everyone has something, it’s no longer cool to have. No longer rare or aspirational. “Research tells us that beauty can evoke positive evaluations that are uniquely human when we come across it,” explains Carly Dober, founder and principal psychologist at Enriching Lives Psychology. “So the more of these Instagram faces we’re all primed and trained to see and understand as beautiful, the more this type of face will become the norm, and the cycle will continue.”

If we imagine a future where the majority of people have smoothed their wrinkles away with Botox, plumped up their lips with filler, sucked out their cheeks with buccal fat removal and straightened their teeth with veneers, will it become desirable to have the natural features that are becoming increasingly rare; the crooked teeth, the smile lines and crow’s feet? We’ve already seen the Kardashians shrink their bodies and lose their surgically-designed curves. Others have followed suit by removing breast implants, while interest in unclockable “microsurgeries” on social media has grown. More creators are sharing vlogs of themselves dissolving filler from their faces. Then there’s Pamela Anderson, who’s in a new era of embracing a make-up-free look to resounding success. “Ugly over time becomes pretty when that ugliness is associated with the ruling class,” Defino explains. “Because that's what beauty is; a class performance.”

“Ugly over time becomes pretty when that ugliness is associated with the ruling class. Because that's what beauty is; a class performance” – Jessica DeFino

Of course, it’s more than likely that the version of “ugly” that becomes trendy will only be acceptable for a very narrow range of people. Not everyone will be allowed the luxury of being “ugly”. Back in 2022, Fox wrote, “Ugly is in” on her Instagram story and made statements like “I wanna see bellies hanging over the low rise jeans pls”. It sparked conversations about who gets to divert from the norm, especially as people who are Black, brown, have disabilities, are fat, or come from a lower socioeconomic status aren’t afforded the luxury of being ugly, even in an ironic or conceptual way. “She doesn’t have any personal or political risk by assuming one ‘ugly’ feature because generally celebrities are allowed to deviate in one way so long as they conform in every other way,” Defino explains.

For our contemporary dominant beauty ideals, ugliness means not fitting the golden ratio, embracing makeup-free faces, lacking symmetry, diverging from Eurocentric beauty standards, or not matching the ethnically ambiguous mosaic countless trends have created. These are things like crooked teeth, wide noses, close-set eyes, wrinkles, grey hair, thin lips, wide jaws, and high foreheads. The only people who are applauded for having these features are still very conventionally attractive. “With the example of Pamela Anderson, her thinness, whiteness, her money, her social status, it makes it easier for her to skip make-up and not really face social consequences for that,” Defino continues. In that same way, we accept Fox’s avant-garde looks, Jane Fonda’s ageing and Rihanna’s high forehead.

It’s easy to be frustrated with someone as conventionally beautiful as Fox, but in order to reject and reclaim beauty standards we all must start somewhere. And maybe it starts with someone questioning the very standards they’ve benefited from. “I was just really over catering to the beauty standards imposed upon me. Like, for what? For who?” Fox says. “If I wear make-up it’s because I’m getting into character, it’s an art form for me. It’s never to look ‘pretty’ or ‘hot’. That is so boring. At one point everyone was doing their make-up the same way and looking like carbon copies of each other. It was like a dystopian horror film but it’s real and we are all participating in it. I do feel like there has been a shift, and I’d like to think I contributed to it.”

For some, ‘ugly’ is a word steeped in negativity. But to break out of this current Instagram face vortex, ‘ugly’ must be embraced as permission to deviate from a norm that serves everyone but ourselves. Authenticity, embracing idiosyncrasies, and seeing the beauty in uniqueness is almost at our fingertips. And as we barrel towards a future where our humanity may be rarer than it is now, ugly may just be something we wish we had held onto sooner. According to a Europol report, “Experts estimate that as much as 90 per cent of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026.” As artificial and synthetic information begins to outweigh authentic content online, futurist trend forecaster Geraldine Wharry believes there will be an equal and opposite reaction. “In the future as more synthetic content is produced by bots and AI, it might be a badge of honour, to prove that your face is real, that you have had zero surgery and that you're just naturally beautiful” – and, not a robot.

So if we reject the male gaze, trends, capitalism, and internet monoculture, will society be ready to accept authenticity as the standard? Or are we just in an inescapable loop where the elite define what’s desirable, and the rest of us mindlessly chase after it? Defino tells me that she likes the idea of a world that embraces ugly people but to achieve true neutrality, one must dream bigger than setting new beauty standards: we must destroy them.

“Beauty standards are a way to economically, politically, socially and financially punish people. If ugliness is part of that standard, I don’t think it has much benefit. The world I want to live in is one where it’s fine to be ugly without product intervention. Where you can just live a happy, fulfilled life without discrimination and full of love and friendship and money and all of the other social advantages that pretty people are given.”