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Sorry to hear that carolita; how cruel!

I feel my introversion, inability to make/hold eye contact and even my altruistic and empathetic nature have evolved from my insecurities about how I look.

I never refer to people as "ugly"; things, yes, but not people. Like, I think those giant sunflowers are ugly. Yet, the sunflower is my favorite flower. It's ugly but pretty! There's a French term that describes this paradox: joli-laid.

Can anyone identify that unfortunate creature in the photo?

This discussion seems to be limited to the confines of western/ European standards of ugly/ beautiful. An interesting, but very limited, discussion, indeed.

I think that people find ugly what is out of the norm, but if it becomes a new norm we will accept it and thus it will become pretty (or at least not as ugly). I think that when the eye get used to see something ugly, the ugliness starts to disappear.
For example: when the new rounded car came out, everybody thought they were ugly and now we have accepted it and we find them very pretty.

I don't know how much distinction you are making between ugliness and mere unattractiveness. The basic problem with our culture is its limited aesthetics concerning beauty. If you look at models in advertising and in the media you see an extremely narrow physical type: faces and body types not representative of 95% of the people who watch them. It almost encourages a low self-opinion amongst our citizenry by saying there are far more ways to be unattractive than beautiful.

Funnily enough, I've been having an ongoing discussion about this because I'm writing about my childhood, wherein I was known as "Ape-Face Johnson," among other, much more racist eptithets. Six years I endured being barked at (because I was ugly as a dog, apparently), and made fun of every day. And then one day, my looks came into vogue, and people started asking me to be a model. Ironically, this was because there was an "ugly model" movement afoot in the eighties that I was unaware of till someome asked me on a tram in Milan if I belonged to an agency (a real one!) called, "Ugly People Agency."