It sounds to me as if you're so preoccupied with wishing you were pretty that right now, you have no reliable way of telling if you are or not. If your appearance were to change overnight, magically or otherwise, I'm guessing that you'd be all set to say the change was for the worse no matter what you actually looked like before or after.

Have you ever read "The Ugly Duckling", either Andersen's version or Clarissa Pinkola Estes' retelling in Women Who Run With the Wolves?