The Beauty in Ugliness: Rethinking Aesthetics, Aging, and Acceptance

A reflection inspired by the book Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal

Authenticity begins where perfection ends.

For centuries, we’ve been taught—often without realizing it—to divide faces, bodies, and experiences into neat categories of beautiful and unbeautiful. In Ugliness, Hilal challenges this deeply ingrained reflex, asking us to reconsider what these labels truly mean—and who they serve.

Hilal reminds us that what we call “ugly” is rarely an inherent truth. More often, it reflects social discomfort. Ugliness becomes a mirror, revealing what society prefers not to confront: vulnerability, difference, aging, imperfection, and change.

This image reminds us that beneath the surface, complexity, texture, and resilience define us—far more than smoothness or symmetry ever could.

Redefining Beauty Through Skin Health

SkinDose’s work at Oxford extends this conversation by reframing beauty itself—not as flawlessness, but as health, integrity, and authenticity.

My work focuses primarily on skin health: understanding how skin naturally evolves throughout life and supporting its biological foundation to maintain resilience and extend longevity. Rather than chasing a static ideal of perfection, this approach treats the skin as a living archive—shaped by environment, care, stress, recovery, and time.

Skin as a living archive of life and care.

In this framework, beauty is no longer about erasing signs of life. It’s about nurturing biology, strengthening the skin’s ability to adapt, repair, and endure.

Aging as Continuation, Not Decline

When viewed through this lens, longevity takes on a new meaning.

Aging is not a failure of beauty—it is a continuation of it. The visible marks of time, so often dismissed as “ugly,” become evidence of endurance, adaptation, and lived experience.

Aged skin as a testament to resilience

Lines, texture, and change are not flaws to correct, but signals of a system that has persisted. True longevity isn’t a desperate sprint toward youth. It’s a slower, more grounded acceptance of change as both natural and meaningful.

Living Fully in Our Own Skin

In this blended view, beauty is not the opposite of ugliness—and aging is not the enemy of beauty. They coexist, each offering a different kind of truth about what it means to live fully, visibly, and unapologetically in our own skin.

Perhaps the most radical aesthetic shift we can make is not toward perfection, but toward acceptance—of biology, of time, and of ourselves.