Subscribe to the New Statesman today and save 75% <\/p>\n Today, the average Gen Zer spends an average<\/a> of three hours a day on social media, swiping through photos of \u201cperfectly\u201d symmetrical faces, rewarding flawlessness with metrics like follows and likes. In 2019, Jia Tolentino presciently identified the emergence of an \u201cInstagram Face\u201d, arguing that social media algorithms had flattened beauty into a \u201ccomposite of greatest hits\u201d. This \u201csingle, cyborgian face\u201d was notably Euro-centric, Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker, \u201cdistinctly white but ambiguously ethnic\u201d. That year, Instagram banned filters that explicitly depicted plastic surgery, but similar augmenting and enhancing filters still exist. Recent research<\/a> from City University revealed that 90 per cent of young women report using filters on their photos \u2013 smoothing out their skin tones, reshaping their jaws, brightening their teeth.\u00a0<\/p>\n What\u2019s concerning is that the gradual symmetrification of our faces is happening outside of our phones, too. Plastic surgeons are now reporting that patients are referencing<\/a> social media filters in consultations, while female celebrities, rumoured to have had expensive cosmetic enhancements, have started looking increasingly similar<\/a>. Is anyone surprised that a digital culture that reduces beauty to a mathematical formula has bred such an ugly aesthetic ideology as looksmaxxing? Or that boys are now feasting on it, too?<\/p>\n Clavicular famously claims that he doesn\u2019t care about getting laid, but for anyone who is interested in romantic attraction, I\u2019d caution against overinvesting in his singular body ideal. A homogenised view of beauty isn\u2019t just dangerous, but misguided.\u00a0When I think back to the people I\u2019ve fancied most, it\u2019s things like a twisted front tooth or a soft stomach or a twitching bottom lip that I\u2019ve found the most sexy. Because hotness is affective. It lingers in the asymmetrical, the unusual and the off-kilter. It creeps up on you. It metastasises. It\u2019s enacted and interpersonal and exponential.\u00a0<\/p>\n The digital world saps us of these quirks. The things that make us attractive to each other in the real world can make us less appealing to each other online. Thankfully we do exist outside our iPhones \u2013 and a perfectly harmonious face can quickly lose its charm in real life. We\u2019ve all met someone who is conventionally gorgeous but we don\u2019t find attractive, or someone who isn\u2019t conventionally good-looking, who we are magnetically drawn to. Looksmaxxing sells an enticing ideology, but men are better off working on their charisma than breaking their jaws with hammers.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net\/2021\/09\/TNS_master_logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
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