The Captivating Derangement of Looksmaxxing

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 her “Funny Girl” co-star Omar Sharif once said, “The first impression is that she’s not very pretty. But after three days, I am honest, I found her physically beautiful, and I start lusting after this woman!”