Perspective on the Impact of Beauty Standards in "Uglies"

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld pushes the audience into a dystopian world where beauty and conformity are taken to the abnormal becoming the norm. This novel depicts a society several hundred years into the future, where everyone undergoes plastic surgery as soon as they turn sixteen. Tally, a girl about to get the operation, struggles with self-acceptance and belonging although knows that she will become beautiful. Through a turn of events though she gets blackmailed to work for the Specials and betray her friends, all because of their proclamation that they wouldn’t turn her pretty if she didn’t do as they said. Tally’s mind is so focused on becoming pretty that she “would do anything. Anything,” for it.

The book does a great job of showing the tools society uses to reinforce the delusional ideology of beauty: there’s the historical motivation used to scare people into believing its propaganda and then the social pressure to conform. It also describes the “Specials” who are taking advantage of the pretty’s callomania to gain power. Westerfeld managed to educate and warn his readers on how this current social trend can become a means of mass control - in the context of young adult image obsession as well as losing one’s identity through changing the appearance.

The “pretty-making” operation was designed to alleviate human beings from its past problematic nature, known as the “Rusty era”. This society was highly economic-based and materialistically driven; a flawed generation revealed to be a duplicate of the contemporary world. All social classes value the operation, as they are being told through the law that “Rusties” had to suffer and that “no-one would go through unfair treatment according to their looks” because of the operation. This political objective legitimizes the operation and gives a reason for people to feel as this is all that they were born to do: to organize themselves according to strict social stratifications with age and stages of prettiness, “Littlies, Uglies, New-pretties, Middle-pretties, Crumblies”. In the Rusty era, people “killed one another over stuff like different skin colour” and went to the extent of people, “mostly girls, becoming so ashamed at being fat that they would stop eating ... They’d lose weight too quickly, and some would get stuck and would keep losing weight until they died,”; however, “No one got this disease anymore since everyone knew at sixteen they’d turn beautiful. Most people pigged out just before they turned, knowing it would be sucked away”. The operation eradicated the eating disorder epidemic by equalizing beauty for all. In their society wars are avoided by “some cities allowed exotic operations…the authorities here [New Pretty Town] were notoriously conservative,” ensuring that residents of one city would not be prettier than others. This perception of the past shows the Rusty era as an undesirable time, even though this time mimics society today. Westerfeld tried to convince the audience of this problem by adding truth and relating it to the real world, confronting the readers on their actions. He used Tally as a way to promote uniform prettiness to acquire stability. It was a hint of a future possibility to fix the dangerous human behaviours of today and questioning “why go back to that?”.

Before the surgery, everyone is an ‘ugly’ by default. Kids nickname each other by their most egregiously flawed features: “Fattie, Pig-Eyes, Boney, Zits, Freak”. Tally, therefore, describes herself in terms of her deviations of that standard - naming all the deficiencies the society had taught her to have: “her wide nose and thin lips, too-high forehead and tangled mass of frizzy hair, tall and chubby”. Her greatest desire is to get the operation and be a “pretty” so that “she could stop feeling sorry for herself”. Shay, Tally’s best friend, argues with her that “beauty is fictitious” and that she doesn’t want to be a “committee’s idea of a perfect person”. She later argues that the final stage of life is “then dead Pretty”, to which Tally responds, “better than dead Ugly”. So fixated on being beautiful, Tally believes that she “was nothing here. Worse, she was ugly” and pursues her eagerness by fantasising about the operation: “the eyes grew, the nose reduced in size, her cheekbones move upward, and her lips become fuller. Every blemish disappeared, her chin became more defined, her jaw stronger”, therefore conveniently ignoring the gruesome process of “them grinding and stretching your bones to the right shape, peeling off your face and scrubbing all your skin away, and sticking in plastic cheekbones so you look like everybody else”. Westerfeld’s inventive world showcases extreme body modification as the norm but mirrors the real world in some respects.

Tally spends her time dreaming of the process “getting rid of the ugly” and wishes it to happen sooner; much like an impatient typical teen of today. This is evident because (not counting surgery for medical reasons) rhinoplasty is the most requested aesthetic surgical procedure done on teenagers as early as age 13. This is younger than the ages of the characters in the novel; even when including the fact that “teachers said at school that they could make the operation work on some fifteen-year-olds now”. The pretty society fosters the innate quality of human beings to conform. Some of which, are even aware that “history would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep...easier to manage and to control” and with the use of coercion, it perpetuates conformity. People are motivated to go along with the system because it is “normal”.

In the book, characters called “Special Circumstances” are introduced as the controllers of the diminishment of the “perfect” world. In an interview with Simon & Schuster’s book newsletter, Westerfeld describes them as “sort of like when adults try to control how teenagers dress, cut their hair, use make-up, and get tattoos or piercings”. As a more extreme version of adults, these characters eliminate the people that pose a threat to conformism and dominate the entire city. Specials are the most extremely modified of all, feared for their looks and inhuman abilities: “He was beautiful, but it was a terrible beauty. He was cruelly beautiful and overpowering and in his presence respect was saturated with fear”. These people are there to spread the propaganda and convince that “humanity is a disease, a cancer on the body of the world…Special Circumstances…we are the cure”. Dr Cable, the one in charge, points out that without regulation, humanity will repeat its mistakes and doom itself once again, “humans are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything by touch”. Westerfeld has foreshadowed a future that can become a reality for the society of today. By social media, the fashion industry and celebrities are convincing people to hate themselves and each other because of their appearance. It provides the opportunity for an authority to seize power: they affirm their superiority while persuading others to feel negative about themselves. The plastic industry will thrive and getting body modifications will become the norm. Someone will take advantage of this and use it to implement a way of control through this addiction. As statistics show, almost 18 million people underwent cosmetic surgery in the United States alone in 2018. This number is a 2% increase from 2016 and is estimated to continue rising. With this preoccupation on beauty, this futuristic city may not be so far off for the society; “there are no more controversies, no disagreements, no people demanding change. Just a bunch of depressed uglies, along with a mass of smiling pretties and a few people left to run the place”.

The author has successfully created a masterpiece: an insight into a world of invasive technology and beauty obsessions pushed to the extreme. Uglies relates to identity because it demonstrates that once someone gets plastic surgery they are no longer themselves. The transformation from ugly to pretty alters Tally’s identity and she loses her sense of subjectivity. The reason the plastic surgery industry is so effective is that it scares people into thinking they must conform to improve their society. Otherwise, they are not worthy, with their “deformities” belittling them to a mess. They, therefore, aim for a change, “the worst damage is done before they even pick up the knife: You’re all brainwashed into believing you’re ugly”. Such beliefs are showing up in contemporary society and it is only a matter of time before this book turns from fiction to nonfiction.