Can “ugly thoughts” make us ugly?

If you’re a 90s kid, like me, you almost certainly read The Twits when you were growing up. To refresh your memory – or to bring you up to speed – it’s about an unkempt couple named Mr and Mrs Twit who, between them, have a food-caked beard, a glass eye, bad breath, awful BO, and a crooked nose. Simply gross. But shockingly, we learn that Mrs Twit had been born with a ‘nice face’ – her ugliness is because of her ugly thoughts. Because, as Roald Dahl writes, ‘if a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.’

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At face value, The Twits seems to be a bog-standard lesson in personal hygiene and the power of kind words – the bread and butter of primary school PSHE. The moral of the story is simple: beauty radiates from within. But recently, I started to think about this age-old conundrum once again, thanks to a newspaper opinion column. Can the soul shape the body? And can you become ugly if you have ugly thoughts? And ooft, having done a deep dive into this, it’s philosophical stuff.

Scientific studies tell us that our perception of physical beauty is coloured by our perception of their behaviour – but that can work both ways. 

Scientific studies tell us that our perception of physical beauty is coloured by our perception of their behaviour – but that can work both ways. The halo effect, a term coined by Edward Thorndike in 1920, shows that one positive trait, behaviour, or interaction can distort our perception of someone – so, perhaps, when we see someone who is conventionally beautiful, our brains trick us, making us see beauty that’s actually not there.

Then there’s face reading, the practice of assessing a person’s character or personality from their outward appearance – which, thanks to TikTok, seems to be having a resurgence just now. For example, full lips are said to suggest that a person is empathetic and confident, whilst a defined cupid’s bow reveals the productive character of an individual. Fine, that’s all pretty positive, even if I struggle to understand how you can extrapolate character traits from genetically inherited features. But there’s a darker side to this. Historically, physiognomy was used to justify racial and social discrimination, with physical imperfections seen to correspond to moral flaws. And so, at this point, alarm bells start ringing for me – not least because my dissertation was on this very topic.

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But what does the Bible have to say about this – can we determine someone’s inner character based on their outward appearance? Like all good essays, I think the answer is a mixture of yes and no.

First, yes. It’s a beauty that won’t enable you to win Miss World or give you golden ratio features, but rather it’s something that’s ethereal and hard to quantify.

First, yes. It’s a beauty that won’t enable you to win Miss World or give you golden ratio features, but rather it’s something that’s ethereal and hard to quantify. When we see God’s glory, we are transformed into his radiant image (2 Corinthians 3:18). In other words, as we become more like Jesus and our hearts are purified, we radiate more of what Charles Spurgeon called Jesus’ ‘superlative beauty’ – and that gives us a beautiful countenance. It’s been called the ‘Jesus Glow’ and it’s most certainly true of the older saints I have been privileged to know in my life.

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But then also, no. Jesus healed and saved those who were not beautiful or attractive in the eyes of the world – a woman with a bent back (Luke 13:10–17), a man with a withered hand (Luke 6:6–11), the lame and the crippled (Matthew 15:30–31), a leper (Matthew 8:1–4), and more. Physiognomic theory would tell us that each of these individuals had bad characters, but Jesus saw their hearts. Like him, we must stop stigma, look beneath the surface, because, as AW Tozer so aptly put it, ‘beauty is in the eye of the Creator’. And that’s my prayer, that God would give me his eyes to see the inner beauty – the Jesus-like beauty – of those around me and that he’d cultivate it within me, too.