The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement | The New Yorker

In their warped and wrongheaded way, the omnipresent influencer Clavicular and his looksmaxxing compatriots are intent on demystifying the ideal of natural beauty.

Save this story Save this story You’re reading Critic’s Notebook , our weekend column looking at the most interesting moments in the cultural Zeitgeist. The French, in all their Continental wisdom, have a word for people who are ugly in theory yet beautiful in practice. Someone who is jolie laide (literally, pretty-ugly) ought by rights to be unappealing, but, somehow, she isn’t. Her features are strange and unexpected—and all the more compelling for their divergence from the usual tidy symmetries. Canonically jolie-laide celebrities include Charlotte Gainsbourg and Barbra Streisand , of whom

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