Ugly Is the New Pretty: How Unattractive Selfies Took Over the Internet

Last year, Bay Area poet Sonya Renee Taylor did something many people wouldn’t: She picked a photo of herself that she hated, and made it her Facebook profile picture. Taylor already had her hundreds of  well-curated images on the Internet. And, before this move, she had been regularly combing her Facebook profile for unflattering images and untagging them.

But Taylor had also just launched a “positive body image community” called The Body Is Not an Apology, and had grown wary of the ways in which she upheld the same beauty standards that her new website was railing against. “I had this secret cyber world full of images of myself that I hated,” she recalls. “I realized the reason that I was so intent on making them disappear was because I had this idea that I should only be seen if I looked a certain way.”

So Taylor took one of those images — the kind she would normally swiftly delete — and put it in Facebook’s marquee spot. She did the same thing the following Monday, and the Monday after that, christening the project “Bad Picture Monday” and encouraging others to follow her lead. Two years later, her once fledgling community has more than 16,000 fans on the social network. Indeed, at a time when impossibly glossy, carefully constructed images — not just of models and celebrities, but of lifestyle bloggers, Instagram stars, and old acquaintances you now only see online — invade our lives daily, “ugly photos” like hers are having a moment.

Via: Ugly Is the New Pretty: How Unattractive Selfies Took Over the Internet