“Reeling and Writhing and then the different branches of Arithmetic- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision.”

There's a lipstick for every pig, it seems:

In a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone, a character named Janet Tyler anxiously awaits the removal of her facial bandages. Describing herself as a “grotesque, ugly woman”, Tyler desperately wants to know if this, her 11th operation, has finally done the trick of transforming her from a “pitiful twisted lump of flesh” into something fit to be seen in public. The bandages come off and the doctors shrink back, horrified, into the shadows, shouting “No change! No change at all!”. Finally, Janet’s face is revealed to the camera: she is pure Hollywood blonde, part Doris Day, part Janet Leigh, encircled by medics who have the faces of diseased swine.

The episode is titled “Eye of the Beholder”: hardly subtle, but it made the point to a world still trying to find its postwar moral centre that ugliness is a cultural construct, local and particular, rather than a universal value. Yet it turns out that even such a relatively capacious definition won’t do for Gretchen Henderson, the author of this absorbing “cultural history” of ugliness. In particular, she is worried by the way that ugliness continues to be regarded as the fixed and eternal opposite of beauty: where one goes, the other is bound to follow. 

It would be far better, Henderson suggests, to think of ugliness as a floating qualifier. Anything or anyone, in certain contexts, can become ugly, by which she means broken, unfinished or, to borrow a phrase from anthropology, “out of place”. And that, according to Henderson, who remains positively perky when discussing everything from hook noses to eating your own vomit, is just the way she likes it. Lining up behind Umberto Eco, who has also written extensively on the subject, she suggests that beauty is dull because it is closed, finished and always the same. Ugliness, by contrast, is infinite and everywhere, like God...

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/07/ugliness-a-cultural-history-gretchen-e-henderson-review