Beauty in the Age of Comparison (On looksmaxxing and the new beauty standards)

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular when the video appeared: a plus-sized young woman, her face frozen mid-sentence so she looked distorted. Then, like a rejection stamp, the word “mogged” flashed across my screen. What ensued were clips of thin models and so-called “conventionally” attractive people. The visual contrast and the words themselves instructed viewers to pit the supposed ugliness of the first woman against the beauty of the people that followed. I opened the comments expecting users to call out the creator’s cruelty. Instead, hundreds of teenagers were laughing at her, rating her looks, comparing her features to the other women in the video as if she were an inanimate object whose value could be reduced to a number.

I didn’t even know what “mogged” meant at first, but after a few more videos, I learned that to be “mogged” is to be outshined in looks—declared visually inferior by comparison. What struck me was that it wasn’t a joke. These videos reflect an ideology that treats beauty as hierarchical. Within looksmaxxing culture, which promotes the optimization of beauty, people are sorted into categories such as “sub-5” and “htb” based on attractiveness. These labels disregard the subjectivity of beauty and instead impose rigid standards on impressionable teenagers about what determines physical attractiveness.

Alongside these edits, influencers or “looksmaxxers” further reinforce this ideology. They promote the belief that “looks are everything” and establish strict rules about which features are considered “superior”—a sharp jawline, thick eyebrows, a straight nose, high cheekbones, and a wide maxilla, to name a few. They employ scientific terminology and biological explanations to support their claims about beauty, attempting to present subjective standards as objective fact. As a result, people begin to feel that it is permissible to rate others’ appearances, desensitizing young people to the cruelty of online bullying. Teenagers have internalized this ideology of enhancing one’s attractiveness and, in turn, made it trendy to subscribe to the culture of looksmaxxing. The video I saw was this belief system in action.

What begins as theory in looksmaxxing videos turns into practice as edits similar to the one discussed here continue to flood teenagers’ feeds. These edits make side-by-side comparisons, freeze frames to make someone look worse, highlight flaws in slow motion, zoom in on imperfections, and dismiss people with flippant terms like “mogged” and “sub-3.” Trending sounds then amplify these videos further, increasing the reach of online bullying and ridicule. The edits normalize cruelty and make social hierarchy based on something as trivial as appearance seem natural.

Thousands of teenagers, compelled by online herd behavior, amplify hateful comments, reinforcing this absurd ideology as normal. Strangers assign numerical ratings to strangers, collapsing beauty into numbers as if a person’s worth could be calculated like a produce item in a grocery store. Edits are not harmless entertainment; they are a way to participate in the hierarchy. They require comparison, so someone must always lose. They make humiliation public and allow teenagers to express toxic superiority without facing consequences. They teach viewers to judge people immediately on the basis of appearance alone. Edits do not simply reflect the insecurities of the 21st century—they produce them.

Beneath the use of empirical language lies a gendered social hierarchy. Women are labeled “catfishes” and “frauds” for wearing makeup. They are expected to maintain “natural beauty,” yet are scrutinized when they fail to meet unrealistic standards. Misogyny is deeply ingrained in digital culture. When editors and influencers belittle women on the basis of appearance, they legitimize misogyny and reduce women to objects subject to evaluation rather than people deserving complexity. Looksmaxxing vocabulary turns women’s faces into data. Edits exaggerate flaws to create contrast. The ideology disguises an old truth: women are still judged by standards that reduce them to their appearance.

Looksmaxxing culture also conceals a racialized social hierarchy—one that often valorizes whiteness above all else. Preferences for aquiline noses, narrow jaws, and lighter skin frame Eurocentric features as superior. Edits follow this framework, often depicting white faces “mogging” Black ones. Comment sections treat whiteness as the baseline for attractiveness, disguising racism, perhaps even eugenics, as science. Terms like “ratios” and “symmetry” become scientific justifications for what are ultimately racial hierarchies. What these rankings present as objective beauty is merely repackaged white supremacy. It is archaic prejudice disguised as modernity.

Beyond its social impact, looksmaxxing has reshaped how teenagers think not only about others but also about themselves. Self-confidence and personal value have become derivative of numerical evaluation. Teenagers begin viewing their “flaws” through measurements like ratios and eye symmetry. They compare themselves to models and influencers, aspiring to unattainable internet ideals. Many widely watched influencers go to extreme lengths to achieve their desired appearance, injecting themselves with testosterone and peptides without hesitation. Normal features become flaws, and teenagers begin to see their faces as problems to fix in pursuit of the ideal.

As a result, identity becomes undermined by whether one is considered “attractive” or “unattractive.” Individual worth becomes conditional, and insecurity becomes necessary. The real damage comes not only from the public cruelty of strangers, but also from the quiet, constant self-judgment the system teaches teenagers to internalize.

What began as simple edits about self-improvement has transformed into a culture built on social hierarchy. Rooted in the digital age, this ideological framework presents itself as modern. Yet its core logic—the belief that human worth can be measured, sorted, and compared—is deeply outdated. The tragedy of this culture is not simply that teenagers are obsessed with beauty, but that they are being taught to see themselves through a system designed to diminish them.