claytoncubitt:

“No, jolie laide aims to jog us out of our reflexive habits of looking and assessing by embracing the aesthetic pleasures of the visually off kilter: a bump on the nose, eyes that are set too closely together, a jagged smear of a mouth. It points away from the kittenish, pliant prettiness of Brigitte Bardot toward the tense, smolderingly imperfect allure of Anouk Aimée or Jeanne Moreau. Although the concept of jolie laide recognizes that “men act and women appear,” as the writer John Berger once put it, it also recognizes that behind the visceral image lies an internal life. In that sense it is a triumph of personality over physiognomy, the imposition of substance over surface. Think of Ellen Barkin’s wonderfully crumpled semaphore of a smile instead of Christie Brinkley’s gleaming, uncomplicated flash of teeth; of Sofia Coppola’s introspective, girl-in-a-Vermeer-painting aura rather than the paint-by-numbers cheerleader vibe of Lindsay Lohan.” -Daphne Merkin, ‘The Unfairest of Them All’, 2005