Whether you’re writing about piranhas or villains, ugly can quickly become your nemesis. This post will help you avoid repetition by providing alternatives. Although the following sections concentrate on human characters, many of the approaches could also apply to animals and inanimate objects.

Emotion Beats and Physical Manifestations

Assuming that your ugly entity is a human (or perhaps an alien), sometimes the best approach is to show reactions of other characters, who might exhibit body language such as the following.

• avoiding the ugly character
• blinking
• bullying the person
• curling their upper lip
• elbowing the person aside
• gaping
• giggling
• leaning away
• making excuses for not interacting with the person
• making sudden audible inhalations
• not meeting the person’s gaze
• pointing
• pursing their lips
• raising their eyebrows
• reacting with a mocking smile
• reacting with rude remarks or jokes
• recoiling
• refusing a date
• refusing to acknowledge the person during a conversation with others
• rolling their eyes
• sneering
• staring
• taking a photo
• turning away
• widening their eyes so much that the whites show
• wrinkling their nose
• yawning while the other person is talking

For more emotion beats and physical manifestations, consult a body language dictionary. (As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)

Adjectives

A lazier method, and one that saves words, is to choose a descriptor like one of the following. Select a word that matches the degree of ugliness; for example, plain and gruesome will trigger different images in readers’ minds.

A to N
abhorrent, appalling, awful, bad-looking, bleak, contemptible, deformed, disagreeable, disfigured, disgusting, foul, frightful, ghastly, grisly, gross, grotesque, gruesome, hard-featured, hideous, homely, horrible, horrid, horrific, horrifying, ill-favored, loathsome, misshapen, monstrous, mousy, nasty, nauseating

O to V
odious, off-putting, ordinary, plain, pugly (pug ugly), repellant, repelling, repugnant, repulsive, revolting, sickening, stomach-churning, stomach-turning, unappealing, unappetizing, unattractive, unbeautiful, uncomely, unenticing, uninviting, unlikeable, unlovely, unpalatable, unpleasant, unprepossessing, unseemly, unsightly, vile

Nouns

Although attractiveness and unattractiveness are subjective, many of the following nouns conjure the image of an ugly person. Not all brutes or shrews will be ugly, though. Context must guide your readers.

You could refer to a character as a/an:

A to W
abortion, animal, barbarian, battle-axe, bear’s breakfast, beast, brute, crone, devil, eyesore, freak, Gorgon, hag, harpy, Medusa, miscreation, monster, monstrosity, ogre, pile of dung, pile of puke, shrew, slug, swine, troglodyte, troll, villain, witch, worm

Similes and Metaphors

Some of these comparisons have appeared often enough to be considered cliché. Take the mental images evoked by the phrasing and create your own wording.

Revolting as

• a drain clog
• a hairless cat
• maggot soup
• moldy leftovers
• a rotting corpse
• a spider
• an unflushed toilet

With a face like

• cat barf
• dog puke
• curdled milk
• road kill
• a rotten apple
• a moldy pumpkin
• a smashed egg
• wormy leather

Props

A suitable prop can augment a storyline and lead in new directions. Would one of these suit your work in progress?

• acne
• a bar fight
• a [birthmark, cluster of moles]
• a broken [bathtub, mirror, window]
• a [boat, car, plane, railway, spaceship] accident
• congenital anomalies
• a difficult [birth, pregnancy]
• eczema
• a fire
• a first date
• explosion of [a dye vat, a laser blaster, a stun gun]
• frostbite
• magic gone awry
• a nuclear attack
• a one-night stand
• a prison riot
• rosacea
• scars
• surgery gone awry
• tattoos
• a time machine
• an unsuccessful suicide attempt
• vitiligo
• war injuries
• a wedding dress

Describe Bodies or Body Parts

Try to show rather than tell when it suits your narrative. For example:

• His gape exposed brown meathook-teeth that threatened to pierce his cratered lips.
• The wind whooshed unkempt hair away from a scaly face with a crooked nose and a jutting chin that stuck out like a spear looking for a victim.
• His lopsided eyes goggled in multiple directions, above a squished nose and lipless mouth.
• Her twisted body threw a shadow against the rock, a shadow that conjured the image of a bat with misshapen wings.

Clichés and Idioms

If you rely heavily on clichés and idioms, ugly might rear its ugly head more often than expected. Avoid phrasing like the following, except in limited cases where the wording might suit your characters.

• an ugly duckling
• an ugly mug that only a mother could love
• as large as life and twice as ugly
• as ugly as a toad
• as ugly as sin
• butt ugly
• coyote ugly
• hit by the ugly stick