A new documentary, “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere,” hit number one on Netflix this spring, spotlighting the influencers who exploit young men and monetize their insecurity. One way they do this is through looksmaxxing apps.
Imagine a 15-year-old taking a selfie. Seconds later, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm returns its verdict: 6.3 out of 10. Underneath, a list of repairs: improve your canthal tilt, sharpen your jawline, raise your facial harmony, increase your masculinity. He has just been told, by something that sounds like science, how far his face sits from “optimal.”
What the app has done is quieter than an insult, and harder to argue with. It has taken the concept of attractiveness, an idea people have always disagreed over, and converted it into an objective measurement. A classmate who calls a kid ugly is being cruel; an app that scores him 6.3 is being, apparently, scientific.
These apps are part of a booming looksmaxxing economy with a following of largely teenage boys. One of them, Umax, was downloaded an estimated 200,000 times in a single month. The trend is alarming enough that clinicians have begun warning about its health effects. Psychiatry professor Gene Beresin, MD, says he has seen a spike in adolescent boys whose preoccupation with their looks leads to significant physical and mental health consequences, such as eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
I’ve been trained to trust evidence before claims, so I took to testing out these systems. I ran three of the most popular apps — LooksMax AI, Umax, and PSL — on my own face. I couldn’t get my score without paying for a subscription, but I got a full list of measurements the apps would assess and a promise from one of the apps that I would become “top-tier attractive” in 90 days if I subscribed. Before assessing anything, each showed me what success was supposed to look like. The details varied, but the pattern did not: symmetrical faces, light eyes, fair skin, prominent bone structure. The same narrow ideal.
The number 6.3 is not a feeling. It is an output reflecting choices someone made about what society values. PSL promises that appearance is “no longer left to chance” and offers a protocol to help users “ascend to [their] genetic potential.” The broader looksmaxxing movement promotes fixes ranging from skincare to medically unproven jaw exercises known as “mewing,” and even “bone smashing” to reshape the jawline. The app photographed my face from multiple angles behind a lock icon and the words “Your privacy is our priority.” But not one of the apps I tested meaningfully verified my age; a child could have clicked through exactly as I did.
In healthcare, a metric or score — such as the Patient Health Questionnaire depression screen for adolescents — earns trust only after it has been tested. We ask whether it measures what it claims to, performs consistently across populations, and defines a meaningful outcome. These apps don’t explain how their desired outcomes were defined or validated. PSL broke my face into roughly 30 scored metrics, including orbital depth, maxilla, mandible, gonial angle, ramus, interpupillary distance, and facial width-to-height ratio. It has the look of a facial-bone assessment a surgeon or orthodontist would order, but with no chart, no clinician, no validated method. The appearance scores I reviewed instead followed a marketing sequence: present an ideal, measure you against it, name your deficiencies, then sell the remedy.
Beyond a physical mental health issue, these apps are also a matter of health equity. A 2018 study found commercial facial analysis tools misclassified the gender of darker-skinned women up to 34% of the time, compared with less than 1% of lighter-skinned men. A 2024 study found that face-altering beauty filters common on social media apps consistently remodeled features toward Eurocentric norms. What remains poorly understood is how such apps and filters affect young people across race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
Body dissatisfaction is already widespread among LGBTQ+ youth: The Trevor Project found that in 2023, 87% reported dissatisfaction with their bodies, and those who did had roughly twice the odds of a past-year suicide attempt compared with those who were satisfied with their bodies. For a Black, Brown, queer, or transgender teenager, the concern is not just about whether the AI system affirms that they are good-looking; it is whether the standard was ever built with their faces, identities, or experiences in mind.
Apps scoring a teenager’s jaw, skin, and “masculinity” deserve scrutiny. Texas has moved to require age checks before minors download apps, but a child’s protection shouldn’t depend on what state they live in. Federal lawmakers must pass legislation to ensure that any app that scores attractiveness or “genetic potential” must show how the score works, how it was validated, and on whose faces it was built.
Social media content promoting unrealistic beauty standards, which was linked to an uptick in eating disorders among girls, spurred real action only after a whistleblower exposed a 2019 internal Facebook slide that read, “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” In response, Congress held hearings about Facebook, Instagram, and mental health harms. Lawmakers have introduced legislation to protect kids online. Facebook paused its planned Instagram product for children.
As looksmaxxing apps emerge as social media’s mostly male counterpart, they deserve that same scrutiny.
