Thin is more beautiful than fat, young more beautiful than old, taut better than sagging. On these points, says sociologist Giselinde Kuipers, most of us agree. Yet there is no single ideal of beauty in today’s world. Beauty itself has become the ideal.

Kuipers, research professor of sociology at KU Leuven, spent the second semester of the academic year 2025/2026 as a fellow at NIAS. There she wrote Lelijke mooie wereld (‘Ugly Beautiful World’), published this September by Das Mag.

In what her publisher calls a manifesto, she traces how appearance has grown steadily more important since the nineteenth century, and why she regards this ‘beauty regime’ as destructive. It draws us into a competition that exhausts us, our society and the planet. It teaches us to treat our bodies as aesthetic projects. And it deepens inequality, since beautiful people grow richer while the rich find it ever easier to become beautiful.