Jolie laide

Jolie laide (English translation: "beautiful ugly") is the French expression used to describe someone who is unconventionally beautiful. Snaggle teeth, a bump in the nose, closely set eyes are just a few examples of unconventional physical traits, which some might view as deformities, that are embraced under the notion of jolie laide. 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. As the literary critic Daphne Merkin put it, jolie laide is "a triumph of personality over physiognomy, the imposition of substance over surface."