Chasing Beautiful

How Technology Is Reshaping Our Views of Beauty

It’s no secret that modern society is obsessed with appearance. Commercials, billboards, and ads continuously bombard us with products designed to maintain or increase our attractiveness, with the implied (or often explicit) message that the better you look, the better you will feel about yourself. That people are convinced by this messaging can easily be seen by our spending habits. The global cosmetics industry was valued at $374  billion in 2023.

A concern with how we look is common to nearly every society in every period of history. But the technological advancements of the contemporary era, most notably social media and AI, have begun influencing how people think about their bodies and looks in ways that have never before been seen.

Looksmaxxing

One growing trend, largely affecting young men, is referred to as “looksmaxxing.” Its roots come from online incel (involuntarily celibate) communities, where participants tend to blame women and feminism for their inability to find or keep a romantic partner, but it has since spread to Reddit, TikTok, and other larger social media platforms. The goal of looksmaxxing is to help men appear more manly—to maximize their appearance—which will in turn, at least theoretically, help them get dates. “The ultimate goal,” said a teenager named James, “is to improve your SMV.” SMV stands for “sexual market value.”¹

For some, looksmaxxing stops at softmaxxing—relatively benign interventions, such as diet and exercise, skincare, or hair styling. Softmaxxing can also include non-surgical attempts to alter facial structure, such as “mewing,” which involves pressing one’s tongue against the roof of the mouth to strengthen jaw muscles and thereby improve the look of the jawline. The technique is named after John and Mike Mew, controversial father and son orthodontists who advocate for the practice first developed by the father. (The American Association of Orthodontists warns against mewing, writing that the evidence for its effectiveness “is as thin as dental floss.”)

While most of these activities fall into the category of proper care and hygiene (mewing excepted), those in the looksmaxxing community see them as an attempt to attain a specific masculine ideal, such as one epitomized in the community by Christian Bale’s portrayal in American Psycho of the serial killer Patrick Bateman.² Those willing to take more extreme measures might participate in hardmaxxing—steroids, hair transplants, chin extensions, and other plastic surgeries. While followers going to these lengths are few, their number is increasing, and they certainly affect others within the community who now look to role models with facial features they can never hope to attain without undergoing such procedures themselves.

Algorithms, AI & Shifting Standards

Looksmaxxing is a very specific trend limited to young men; much more familiar to most are the pressures contemporary beauty standards can create on women to “measure up.” For decades people have lamented how TV, movies, magazines, commercials, and even billboards promote an idealized “beauty” that few can live up to. Even the ubiquitous Barbie is based on proportions no woman could hope to achieve naturally. Barbie, like many depictions of feminine beauty, is a caricature presented as an ideal, and yet these caricatures like Patrick Bateman and Barbie have become something to strive for.

The advent of social media has only exacerbated the comparison game, and the results have been devastating for many adolescents and young adults. One recent study found that social media use was associated with both “body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness.”³ Another found that merely reducing social media use for as little as three weeks resulted in significant improvements to teens’ and young adults’ body image.⁴ Rises in rates of depression and suicidality have been tied to social media use, and much of it stems from constant comparison to other people.

Even as social media users compare themselves to other users to see how they match up to current standards, the standards themselves are changing. Part of this is a function of how social media operates. Images on social media are often highly curated. Influencers who post photos of themselves do not usually post any old snapshot but present a staged one for which they have prepared, posed, adjusted lighting, and have possibly even digitally altered to present the most attractive version possible of themselves. As more and more people imitate them, the bar on what is “attractive” gets raised.

Another way technology influences standards of beauty comes from the globalization the internet has brought. Some researchers have argued that as people from around the world mix together on social media, beauty standards in the Western world are shifting to favor more Asian, and specifically Korean, features.⁵ Even this shift may be short-lived, though. As ideals are continually evolving, the standard is becoming transracial, incorporating traits associated with many different people groups into an idealized view of beauty never extant in any one person.

Algorithms and AI only accelerate this process. These technologies scan images and measure the proportions of attractive faces to create aggregated, idealized views of the human person, which are then used by cosmetic doctors and surgeons to move people towards these preferred looks. Just as some men pursue looksmaxxing to mold themselves into an imagined masculine ideal, many women embrace cosmetics, Botox, and plastic surgery in a feminine version of the same pursuit. The cycle becomes self-perpetuating, as those who have undergone procedures become a new ideal for others to imitate. As Elise Hu puts it in Wired, “This is part of the technological gaze at work, feeding and creating demand at the same time.”⁶ The technological gaze creates a separation between those who pursue interventions and those who can’t, while also self-reinforcing and narrowing standards, making them harder and harder to achieve. One might look at the trend towards “baby Botox”—young women in their teens and early twenties starting on regular, low dosages of Botox to prevent wrinkles from ever forming—as one example.⁷ Those who are willing and can afford it will age noticeably differently from their peers, retaining an “improved” appearance that others may envy but cannot attain without undergoing the same treatments.

A Harsh Gaze

It may seem obvious that allowing social media and ephemeral beauty standards to measure our self-worth is not beneficial, and yet people do it all the time. Earlier this year, millions of users participated in a TikTok “How old do I look?” challenge, where they posed that question to fellow users to be rated (or more often roasted) in the comments. Strangers on the internet are harsh critics, and most participants were told that they looked much older than they actually were. This simply illustrates the unattainability of current beauty ideals, which hold that women, especially, ought to present themselves in such a way as to make their true age unrecognizable. As one writer observed:

Ultimately, the only way to win the “How Old Do I Look” challenge is to be an over-35 millennial with the ethereal teenage beauty of a Glossier model. The point is to look not just young and beautiful, but effortlessly so. If you are young but not pretty, you lose. If you are young but trying too hard to look pretty, you also lose.⁸

One might point out the futility of investing so much of our self-worth in appearances—no matter how many surgeries or injections someone has, aging will eventually catch up. And yet, most of us are still drawn to the images of beautiful people we see all around us, and for many, there remains a jealousy that these bearers of the new standards have achieved something we cannot hope to replicate. What can we do? And how can we keep a realistic view of beauty in an increasingly technological world?

Resist Artificial Standards

We must become more wary of online life and the ways in which it influences us. We need to bear in mind that what we see there is not real and that we are not failures simply because we don’t look the same. Hu warns that the social internet is

just too big—we weren’t meant to all be in a community of this scale, in which everyone has become our neighbor. It forces us onto the same handful of platforms to present ourselves, platforms that remove distinctions by forcing us to fit into their predetermined forms and profile options   .  .  . humans are extremely good at mimicking one another, and we learn what we desire, and what to desire, based on what our neighbors do.

More than just limiting our social media exposure, we should be intentional about the platforms we participate in and the networks we create for ourselves. The question is not whether we will be influenced; that is a foregone conclusion. Rather, we must shape and monitor our online life so that it only serves worthy, and not nefarious, objectives. Perhaps this is an unobtainable goal; we may discover there is no way to participate in the social internet without some drawbacks. If we cannot adequately mitigate the negative effects and avoid being tossed every which way by judgments of strangers and distorted standards, then perhaps the best way to win at the social media game is not to play.

Our society looks to technology to solve every problem, and if technology causes a problem, the solution we often look for is more technology. Thus, we must give deliberate thought to our engagement and recognize how we are being shaped, both as individuals and as a society. From there, we must further determine what we will allow to happen and in what areas we may need to push back. We have seen numerous negative consequences, and we should only expect them to increase as our reliance on these technologies increases. Social media, algorithms, and AI may be areas where we need to push back rather than allow our standards of beauty to be set by the eyes of artificial beholders.

Notes
1. Simon Usborne, “From Bone Smashing to Chin Extensions: How ‘Looksmaxxing’ Is Reshaping Young Men’s Faces,” The Guardian (February   15, 2024).
2. Riley Farrell, “Inside Looksmaxxing, the Extreme Cosmetic Social Media Trend,” BBC (March   26, 2024).
3. Barbara Jiotsa, et al., “Social Media Use and Body Image Disorders: Association between Frequency of Comparing One’s Own Physical Appearance to That of People Being Followed on Social Media and Body Dissatisfaction and Drive for Thinness,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 6 (2021): 2880.
4. Jim Silwa, “Reducing Social Media Use Significantly Improves Body Image in Teens, Young Adults,” American Psychological Association (February   23, 2023).
5. Elise Hu, “Digital Culture Is Literally Reshaping Women’s Faces,” Wired (May   25, 2023).
6. Ibid.
7. Yasmin Tayag, “The Logical Extreme of Anti-Aging,” The Atlantic (September   25, 2024).
8. Kat Rosenfield, “How Old Do I Look?” The Free Press (March   26, 2024).