Moshtari Hilal, UGLINESS6 Images
“Hey horseface,” read the first comment Moshtari Hilal ever got on a YouTube video. It took her back to being 14 and wanting to hide away her school photos; of being told in the hallway that she had crooked teeth, a long face and a big nose; of learning about her “ugliness”.
In UGLINESS, the Afghan-German artist, writer and curator explores “the outer limit and opposite of beauty” by weaving together memoir, poetry and illustration with in-depth research into the history of ugliness. Her findings span the birth of modern rhinoplasty in the early 20th century as a way of hiding “Jewish” noses amid rising antisemitism to the procedure’s popularity in Iran, which today has the highest rates of nose jobs in the world.
While we discuss beauty freely and often, ugliness is rarely spoken about. Something about the word feels taboo. Yet underlying the products we’re sold to look beautiful and the rituals we’re advised to follow are an effort to stay far away from what might be considered ‘ugly’. It’s the unspoken other side of living in a world with beauty standards. Hilal implores us to think about what we have learned about ugliness throughout our lives and the history these ideas are steeped in. TikTok videos about ‘golden face ratios’ aren’t objective scientific findings; they have roots in pseudoscientific and often racist theories.
The book is a journey through time, weaving in Frantz Fanon’s analysis of self-alienation with the advent of the female razor and a beauty school in Afghanistan. It brings us to the present: a world where ‘Instagram Face’ is beyond reach without cosmetic intervention (and therefore money) and where AI claims to predict your criminality based on your appearance. It’s also a reminder that beauty and ugliness are not superficial categories to be relegated as the vain concerns of teenage girls. They are real and can be used to determine who is seen as less human, less worthy of love, of who can be hated. In German, the word for ugliness (hässlichkeit) starts with the word for hate (hass). What does it mean to speak the word hate to get to ugliness?
Why write a book about ugliness?
Moshtari Hilal: As a visual artist, I did a lot of self-portraits to reconcile myself with what I look like or who I am. I think that’s a very common practice for artists but for me it was also the question of creating an aesthetic that could include me, with the idea of ‘we just have to challenge beauty standards’. I was trying to create new standards or new aesthetic norms.
At some point, I reached the limits of diversifying or revolutionising beauty standards because, at some point, beauty standards are beauty standards and they are supposed to keep certain kinds of bodies outside. You need standards and norms to contrast, to create an exclusive group. The actual and more crucial question is: who is not beautiful? And who will never be beautiful? Because our systems are built to keep them outside. I came across this essay by Mia Mingus who is a disability justice activist and writer, and she asked two questions that inspired this book. Why are we afraid of ugliness? And what can we learn from ugliness? I tried to respond and also research the answers to these questions for myself.
The book combines a personal perspective, starting from your childhood, but also looks at the history, politics and culture surrounding ugliness. You mention ‘systems’ which determine who will never be beautiful. What are those systems and what did you learn from your research?
Moshtari Hilal: It was very important to me that we do not engage in superficial discussions about beauty. Like it’s just vanity, or the insecurity of some teenager or a female problem; there are all these stereotypes around it. But to really deal with them as questions of power, hate and also dehumanisation. I look at the German term “hässlichkeit” which already has the term ‘hate’ in it – so you have to speak the word hate to get to hässlich. I argue that hässlichkeit is not a quality that we can find in others but it’s actually the way we relate to others, like a visual language or visual codes that we are socialised with early on and learn explicitly in our educational system.
For instance, in our biology books and the way our modern media frames who is human, who deserves to have love or attention, and then we recognise it in other people’s bodies. It signals to us, ‘Oh these bodies, these identities, are less worthy or are less relevant’ and sometimes even they are less human, and we are allowed to hate them, or maybe even we are expected to hate them because this is their position in our societies.
How is that determined?
Moshtari Hilal: It has a lot to do with racism, of course, with disability, with sexism. Classic groups that are always considered ugly, historically, are older people, especially older women because they can’t participate in the reproductive system of the nuclear family, of the capitalist idea of what it means to be human and what you can give with your body.
People who live with disability are often outside of our ideas of health and ability in the sense of being able to produce and to participate in the economic systems. Sometimes we need to take care of them, or they need more care from our systems, so they are considered ‘waste’. And racism; arguing that certain kinds of people are less human therefore we are allowed to exploit them, therefore we are allowed to put them in prisons, therefore we’re allowed to physically and systematically exclude them of our citizenship, of access to political rights, to healthcare rights, to space.
Beauty standards are supposed to keep certain kinds of bodies outside. You need standards and norms to contrast, to create an exclusive group.
You recall the first time your aunt pointed out your moustache hair at the age of ten and the visceral pain of bleaching your facial hair, which ‘singed’ your skin and gave you ‘small wounds all over’. How did it feel to revisit those memories?
Moshtari Hilal: It’s actually interesting how easy it was to access those memories. I felt like they were present in my everyday life in a way. Maybe the book was also a place or a medium to finally write them down and to be like: ‘why do I think about these things so much? Why is it so important to me? Why are these some of my core memories of my childhood and my teenage years? What did it do to me?’
Were there associations or ideas that you had been subconsciously taking in?
Moshtari Hilal: I grew up with German history, German sensibilities and German racism and antisemitism, and it did something to me. I was a Muslim Afghan refugee girl dealing with antisemitism towards my own face because I grew up with this idea that I could not look sweet or soft. I very much saw myself in the evil witch or like the greedy stepmother in European media, the way women with strong features are portrayed. I felt like this is not my character, I’m not that hard in reality. I was dealing with these European antisemitic imageries and I think that was an interesting realisation for me. I’m not from Europe. Now I am, but this is not my origin story, yet I was dealing with their history in a way on my own body.
What did you find out about these historical associations between ugliness and negative qualities?
Moshtari Hilal: There has always been beauty, there has always been images of ugliness. [Think of] our ideas of witches, vampires and ghosts, which were European ways of dealing with plagues, death, fear. But I think what is much scarier in our times is when these superstitions and mythological figures are translated and turned into medicine, science and technology. I think this is the issue of the present, that we pretend everything is science and therefore it’s more objective and neutral.
For example, if you really go deep into the whole beauty discourse on TikTok, the way they make it into something very objective, like: “We love symmetrical faces,” “Humans love this kind of face and body shape more.” It’s not that innocent the way they make it, because most of these ideas behind plastic surgery comes from assimilating into fascist regimes. Especially when you look into the history of nose surgery in the Western world.
I think it helps sometimes to bring it back to the origins of the discipline, to contextualise that very few people need to have plastic surgery. Most people have plastic surgery because they want to assimilate and to pretend it’s something they do for themselves. I think we definitely have to de-mystify that and also de-mystify how violent actually having surgery is, because you are unconscious and don’t feel how they cut you open.
Is this about showing how a 30-second reel of a plastic surgeon demonstrating what they can do is actually not so innocent?
Moshtari Hilal: Yes, and also to bring them back to the origins that were racial theory. The way people sometimes measure the distance between their nose and their eyes with filters – these things come from racist anatomy books. These theories are made up. There’s this anecdote I tell in the book, how one of these pseudoscientists goes to a prison and he starts measuring their faces. Then he comes up with this idea that asymmetrical faces mean that you tend to be more insane, but he didn’t realise that his own face was asymmetrical too. That actually human faces are asymmetrical. Symmetry is extraordinary, it’s not normal.
That’s the way we deal with these things, we go to places where people are already excluded, institutionalised – we already hate them – and then we start looking at them and make theories about the way they look and behave. Then these theories become answers.
Are you hopeful we might find our way towards finding a different way to think about beauty and ugliness?
Moshtari Hilal: I started and finished the process of writing this book with Mia Mingus, who gave this idea of what if you confront ugliness and not be so scared of it. What happens if you really get so close to someone in your most ugly moment but also in their most ugly moment and you still realise that you’re worthy of love and care? What kind of relationship, intimacy, but also conversation is being created in that moment?
If you’ve ever been in a moment where you’ve had to deal with disability or sickness or death, you will realise that we have so much more depth and also generosity in our care for others and in our love. We are able to have that and to practice that. It’s more the systemic scale that scares me where people are not interested in engaging with this kind of self-reflection or self-exploration, and they just make it impossible. But just knowing from an individual perspective that it is possible, so that we can possibility scale it up. That makes me hopeful.
UGLINESS is published by New Vessel Press, and is out now.
