In school, uglies learn that during the time of the Rusties (the people who lived on Earth prior to Tally’s society), everyone stayed ugly their entire life—and because of this, experienced racism and discrimination based on their looks. Tally’s society seeks to remedy this by scientifically deducing what makes a person physically beautiful, and making everyone look like that by forcing them to undergo “pretty” surgery as teenagers. Through what Tally and her friends learn in school about beauty, as well as the discoveries Tally makes about what’s possible as an ugly in the Smoke (the hidden settlement where uglies attempt to escape their surgeries), Uglies poses a compelling question: how much of the way people think about beauty is evolutionary, and how much of it is cultural? Though the novel overwhelmingly shows that beauty is cultural more than anything else, the government’s creation and promotion of this idea of scientific beauty in the novel suggests that it’s shockingly easy to justify anything using scientific language, and through doing so, use it to control the population and influence how they think.
When the reader first meets Tally, she’s been distraught for the several months since her best friend, Peris, celebrated his 16th birthday and became pretty. As Tally dwells on her own ugliness, she describes in detail what exactly “pretty” means to her society: pretty people have big eyes and big lips (which tell potential mates that they’re “young and vulnerable,” as well as harmless and in need of protection), clear skin and perfectly symmetrical faces (which convey health and an absence of congenital diseases), and a specific body height and amount of fat (which signals health and fertility). Put together, all of these qualities create people so beautiful that they awe everyone who’s still ugly and not used to seeing such attractive people. Importantly, all of these things that make people beautiful are, as far as Tally is concerned, biological and evolutionary necessities. In Tally’s understanding, it’s impossible to be desirable to a potential partner if one doesn’t have all of these things. This idea permeates Tally’s culture entirely, and it results in young uglies coming up with all manner of rude nicknames for each other like “Nose” or “Skinny” that draw attention to the way that uglies are considered imperfect and unattractive. The language people in Tally’s society use to talk about beauty (having divisions between uglies and pretties, for one, as well as the prevalence of appearance-based nicknames) drives home just how entrenched this singular conception of beauty is in Tally’s culture—and she later discovers that this is by design. The combination of the very language used to talk about beauty and the “scientific” basis for her culture makes it not just the way things are, but the way things are supposed to be, according to science.
Tally begins to question the truth of all of this when, out in the Smoke, she meets the camp’s ringleader, David. David has grown up in the Smoke, performing hard physical labor for his entire life, and he’s a little too old to receive pretty surgery. His body reflects the way he grew up: he has callused hands from shoveling, “too much” muscle from performing hard work, and scars from various injuries. Given everything Tally has learned in school and picked up from her culture, David should never interest a potential partner due to not being perfectly engineered to be scientifically attractive. However, Tally is surprised to find that she is attracted to David. He’s kind and smart, and he moves through the woods with a grace and ease that not even new pretties (who are engineered to move in a specific way) can emulate. Similarly, as their romance grows and deepens, David announces that he thinks Tally is beautiful. Tally’s supposedly too-thin lips, “squinty” eyes, and frizzy hair don’t negatively affect how David sees her, and they don’t make her a fundamentally unattractive person.
Tally’s discoveries seem at first to only suggest that natural beauty is just as valid and real as the surgically optimized beauty of the pretties. But the novel also goes to great lengths to show how Tally’s perception of David changes as she learns more about the culture in the Smoke. She gradually becomes more accepting of David’s callused hands, for instance, as their meaning starts to change: while they once made her think of a difficult life and of a person who probably made mistakes that could be dangerous (she’s been told that people want partners who are “too clever” to hurt themselves), as she comes to appreciate the hard work it takes to keep the Smoke running, the calluses instead signal that David is someone who’s caring, dedicated, and strong. This makes it very clear that while unadulterated uglies can indeed be just as attractive as the pretties, being able to believe in the truth of this means that the culture itself has to shift to be more accepting of a different standard of beauty, as well as of a different way of life with different values.
Tally’s discovery that so-called ugly people can be just as attractive as the pretties coincides more broadly with a growing distrust in the government organizations that decide what “pretty” means. Tally becomes gradually disillusioned with everything she’s been taught about how her world works, what’s true, and what’s not—including about the supposed advantages of being pretty. While Uglies doesn’t fully resolve these issues (the book is the first in a series), it nevertheless makes the point that what people consider beautiful stems from a combination of nature and nurture that nevertheless leans toward nurture—and that what a society suggests is scientific, true, and inarguable may very well contain a kernel of truth, but may also not speak to the whole story.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Beauty, Science, and Influence ThemeTracker
Beauty, Science, and Influence Quotes in Uglies
There was a certain kind of beauty, a prettiness that everyone could see. Big eyes and full lips like a kid’s; smooth, clear skin; symmetrical features; and a thousand other little clues. Somewhere in the backs of their minds, people were always looking for these markers. No one could help seeing them, no matter how they were brought up. A million years of evolution had made it part of the human brain.
“You know,” Shay said, “I read that the real Cleopatra wasn’t even that great-looking. She seduced everyone with how clever she was.”
“Yeah, right. And you’ve seen a picture of her?”
“They didn’t have cameras back then, Squint.”
“Duh. So how do you know she was ugly?”
“Because that’s what historians wrote at the time.”
Tally shrugged. “She was probably a classic pretty and they didn’t even know it. Back then, they had weird ideas about beauty. They didn’t know about biology.”
“Yeah, and people killed each other over stuff like having different skin color.” Tally shook her head. No matter how many times they repeated it at school, she’d never really quite believed that one. “So what if people look more alike now? It’s the only way to make people equal.”
“I didn’t know these things weighed so much.”
“Yeah, this is what a board weighs when it’s not hovering. Out here, you find out that the city fools you about how things really work.”
“You can’t change it by wishing, or by telling yourself that you’re pretty. That’s why they invented the operation.”
“But it’s a trick, Tally. You’ve only seen pretty faces your whole life. Your parents, your teachers, everyone over sixteen. But you weren’t born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.”
“It’s not programming, it’s just a natural reaction. And more important than that, it’s fair.”
“Look, Skinny, I’m with you,” Tally said sharply. “Doing tricks is great! Okay? Breaking the rules is fun! But eventually you’ve got to do something besides being a clever little ugly.”
“Like being a vapid, boring pretty?”
“No, like being an adult. Did you ever think that when you’re pretty you might not need to play tricks and mess things up? Maybe just being ugly is why uglies always fight and pick on one another, because they aren’t happy with who they are. Well, I want to be happy, and looking like a real person is the first step.”
The flying machine had been just like what Tally imagined when her teachers had described Rusty contraptions: a portable tornado crashing along, destroying everything in its path. [...]
But the Rusties had been gone a long time. Who would be stupid enough to rebuild their insane machines?
Tally sat back, shaking her head, coughing once more. The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.
The boy smiled again. He was an ugly, but he had a nice smile. And his face held a kind of confidence that Tally had never seen in an ugly before. Maybe he was a few years older than she was. Tally had never watched anyone mature naturally past age sixteen. She wondered how much of being ugly was just an awkward age.
“So this is what people looked like before the first pretty? How could anyone stand to open their eyes?”
“Yeah. It’s scary at first. But the weird thing is, if you keep looking at them, you kind of get used to it.”
“Maybe they’re just worried because we’re kids. You know?”
“That’s the problem with the cities, Tally. Everyone’s a kid, pampered and dependent and pretty. Just like they say in school: Big-eyed means vulnerable. Well, like you once told me, you have to grow up sometime.”
The physical beauty of the Smoke also cleared her mind of worries. Every day seemed to change the mountain, the sky, and the surrounding valleys, making them spectacular in a completely new way. Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.
Then Tally trembled inside, realizing what the feeling was. It was the same warmth she’d felt talking to Peris after his operation, or when teachers looked at her with approval. It was not a feeling she’d ever gotten from an ugly before. Without large, perfectly shaped eyes, their faces couldn’t make you feel that way. But the moonlight and the setting, or maybe just the words he was saying, had somehow turned David into a pretty. Just for a moment.
Tally remembered crossing the river to New Pretty Town, watching them have their endless fun. She and Peris used to boast they’d never wind up so idiotic, so shallow. But when she’d seen him... “Becoming pretty doesn’t just change the way you look,” she said.
“No,” David said. “It changes the way you think.”
For that matter, shallow and self-centered was how brand-new pretties were supposed to be. As an ugly, Peris had made fun of them—but he hadn’t waited a moment to join in the fun. No one ever did. So how could you tell how much was the operation and how much was just people going along with the way things had always been?
Only by making a whole new world, which is just what Maddy and Az had begun to do.
“That’s not what’s important to me. What’s inside you matters a lot more.”
“But first you see my face. You react to symmetry, skin tone, the shape of my eyes. And you decide what’s inside me, based on all your reactions. You’re programmed to!”
“I’m not programmed. I didn’t grow up in a city.”
“It’s not just culture, it’s evolution!”
She scanned the captives, looking for Shay and David. The familiar faces in the crowd were haggard, dirty, crumpled by shock and defeat, but Tally realized that she no longer thought of them as ugly. It was the cold expressions of the Specials, beautiful though they were, that seemed horrific to her now.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. But that was all ugly stuff. Crazy love and jealousy and needing to rebel against the city. Every kid’s like that. But you grow up, you know?”
“You grew up because of an operation? Doesn’t that strike you as weird?”
