“I even have a theory, in like ten years, being a bit ugly and a bit wrinkly goes to be in fashion,” says Ash Powers in a TikTok video. In the following ten to fifteen years, she explains, when everyone has succumbed to smoothing and tweaking their faces, “we’re going to take a 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 longer term of beauty, and the role we play in setting these standards – or eschewing them entirely.

Today individuals are in a position to artificially customise and contort themselves to suit the dominant beauty standards greater than ever before. Body and face modification isn’t a latest concept by any means. Nevertheless, the technology we’ve and the lengths people go so as to achieve what is taken into account beautiful is more serious lately: cosmetic surgery, filler, injections of poisons, threads under the skin, appetite-suppressing pills, veneers, fat removal. All of this done within the name of a singular beauty ideal that reigns supreme. “It’s youth-focused, makes everyone look ethnically ambiguous, homogenised, and is predicated on beauty created by cosmetic surgery,” sums up Anita Bhagwandas, beauty journalist and writer of Ugly.

Due to our visuals-centric culture, the expectation to be flawless has grown exponentially in recent times resulting in more people going to extreme lengths to attain it. “There may be plenty of pressure on individuals to evolve to a selected aesthetic,” says Nichelle Temple, esthetician and founding father of Inderma Studio. “This will result in unrealistic expectations, antagonistic results and self-esteem issues. Chasing an unrealistic notion of perfection can harm us.” Could it’s, nevertheless, that the tides is likely to be turning?

At first, the recognition of injectables and other cosmetic procedures gave many a way of ‘empowerment’ (an idea often confused with ‘confidence’). Exercising agency over one’s body by changing and editing it seemed innocent enough, but now that the fog of pleasure has cleared, it’s undeniable that nature-defying BBLs, big lips and busty breasts serve one thing: the male gaze. “It’s almost like it’s essential to have these features otherwise 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 maneuver away from the present beauty ideal. “I believe to an extent we’ll at all times value beauty but I believe we are able to move away from valuing one specific variety of it.”

That 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 believe 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 text. Fox has been advocating for “ugly” beauty for the previous couple of 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 surely’s what men would consider to be ugly that shall 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 glance pretty for them? They’re not the rulers of what’s attractive anymore.”

It’s not only the male gaze alone that’s driving today’s beauty standards, nevertheless, says beauty critic Jessica Defino, but quite 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. Loads of today’s standards of beauty wouldn’t be possible, even on essentially the most naturally ‘beautiful’ people, without significant product and procedure intervention.” Product intervention is on 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 on this beauty labour comes at a value.

A 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 provided that you’ve gotten the bank balance to back it up (“I’m not ugly, I’m just poor” because the meme goes). For a very long time, cosmetic surgery was expensive and subsequently out of reach for many individuals. Should 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 turn out to be more financially accessible – whether that’s by scoring a deal on Groupon or by flying to Turkey – the aesthetic isn’t any longer a standing symbol. In any case, wealthy women won’t need to seem like all the ladies on the high street who’ve been botched with low cost filler and haphazardly placed Botox.

Beauty by design is rare. And if we’re to take a look at beauty through the lens of hierarchy and capitalism, not everyone could be beautiful. “Once it’s considered too accessible to the overall population to have these cosmetic enhancements, there needs to be something else that the elite use to distinguish themselves,” as Violet says. Trends are available in cycles precisely because when something becomes saturated into the mainstream it stops being desirable. If everyone has something, it’s now not cool to have. Now not rare or aspirational. “Research tells us that beauty can evoke positive evaluations which might be uniquely human after we come across it,” explains Carly Dober, founder and principal psychologist at Enriching Lives Psychology. “So the more of those Instagram faces we’re all primed and trained to see and understand as beautiful, the more the sort of face will turn out to be the norm, and the cycle will proceed.”

If we imagine a future where the vast 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 turn out to be desirable to have the natural features which might be 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 latest era of embracing a make-up-free look to resounding success. “Ugly over time becomes pretty when that ugliness is related to the ruling class,” Defino explains. “Because that is what beauty is; a category performance.”

“Ugly over time becomes pretty when that ugliness is related to the ruling class. Because that is what beauty is; a category performance” – Jessica DeFino

In fact, it’s greater than likely that the version of “ugly” that becomes trendy will only be acceptable for a really narrow range of individuals. Not everyone shall be allowed the luxurious 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 find themselves Black, brown, have disabilities, are fat, or come from a lower socioeconomic status aren’t afforded the luxurious 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 a technique as 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 one people who find themselves applauded for having these features are still very conventionally attractive. “With the instance of Pamela Anderson, her thinness, whiteness, her money, her social status, it makes it easier for her to skip make-up and probably not face social consequences for that,” Defino continues. In that very same way, we accept Fox’s avant-garde looks, Jane Fonda’s ageing and Rihanna’s high brow.

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

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

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

“Beauty standards are a method to economically, politically, socially and financially punish people. If ugliness is an element of that standard, I don’t think it has much profit. The world I need to live in is one where it’s positive to be ugly without product intervention. Where you possibly can just live a completely satisfied, fulfilled life without discrimination and filled with love and friendship and money and the entire other social benefits that pretty individuals are given.”