Westerfeld takes the image this industry promotes and essentially brings it to another level in his novel, with two simple terms: ugly and pretty. Their industry peddles the idealistic image of societally acceptable beauty, and what it means to be perfect. What they sell is an ideal image, what one can be with their help, their products. The beauty industry is currently worth over 532 billion dollars (according to a 2018 study done by Zion Market Research), and makeup brands, artists and influencers are more popular now than ever. With the use of symbols, character choices, and mimicking parts of real society, Westerfeld’s dystopia is able to reveal the depraved effects that equating ideal physical beauty with acceptance causes in it’s citizens. Uglies uses society’s obsession with perfection and ideal beauty standards as a tool for the government to keep society pacified under their corruption. However within many tropes of this genre exist works that do in fact hold up a mirror to society, including the revolutionary Uglies series by award-winning author Scott Westerfeld. Critics who wash the dystopian fiction genre into young adult fluff, romance with added fantasy that serves no true purpose. Yet with each series phenomenon, with every brooding teenage heroine and her mythical boyfriend- comes critics. Many authors have tried their hand in dystopian fiction.
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