Woman looking at her digitally mapped reflection on a screen
‘Looksmaxxing’ culture has led to the rise of facial analysis services – but experts warn they aren’t backed by science and can be harmful to users
Danielle, 37, didn’t always have issues with body image: she used to be a model and recalls receiving positive attention from men. However, when two years of unemployment plunged her into a period of financial insecurity, her confidence faded. “It was easy to wonder, if I was prettier, if some of my features were different, would that help?” she said.
So, when Danielle saw videos on TikTok about a “facial analysis” service that claimed it could provide her with “science-backed” glow-up advice, she bought it without hesitation. Three-hundred and thirty dollars later, after sending in selfies to be analyzed, Danielle received her personalized 30-page report from the company Qoves.
Qoves scored everything from Danielle’s ear shape to the femininity of her features. It recommended she get a rhinoplasty, a lower blepharoplasty, a canthopexy, chin implants and a malarplasty. Additionally: microblading, lash enhancements, filler in her temples and cheeks, a mixture of filler and Botox in her chin and jaw, and Botox around her mouth.
Danielle, who now works in tech in Colorado, is delaying any cosmetic surgery until she pays off the credit card debt accrued from her two years without a paycheck; once it is, she is interested in traveling to Mexico for procedures on her nose and eyelids. She also recently consulted a Botox and filler injector.
Qoves states that attractive people “get better treatment everywhere, from the hospital to the courtroom” and claims it is easier for them to find jobs and earn money. There is some truth to this: the “halo effect” is a documented phenomenon of good-looking people being perceived as smarter and more sociable than their average-looking counterparts, and studies have linked attractiveness to better pay. For Danielle, who asked to go by first name only for privacy, this promised material advantage was a selling point: “It gave me a motivation that I didn’t have in the past, which was seeing it as potentially helping my career and financial security.”
Plastic surgery and nonsurgical cosmetic enhancements such as Botox have unambiguously increased in popularity over the past two decades, to the point that the aesthetics of bought beauty have become inescapable on social media. This has opened the door for “looksmaxxing” influencers, who take fixation with appearance to the extreme. Coalescing around the language of science and “self-improvement”, looksmaxxers claim that attractiveness can be quantified – that individual features should be analyzed and empirically scored, and physical improvements are made where necessary. The ultimate goal is to achieve “facial harmony”, or the ideal proportions of nose, eyes and other features in relationship to one another.
Now, a slew of facial analysis services are benefitting from the looksmaxxing ethos, capitalizing on people’s insecurities about appearance under the guise of helping them become their best selves. Qoves, which Danielle used, cites peer-reviewed research to lend credibility to its idea of quantifiable beauty. It provides analyses for men and women, and for $150 recommends “nonsurgical” changes, such as injectables, with an optional $180 upgrade for surgical recommendations. Cheaper tools such as Facemaxify and Epica use AI to score the components of a user’s face against an opaque metric of facial harmony. In addition to recommending expensive procedures, the services often offer paid subscriptions. Epica’s specialty is skin and makeup plans for women, and it directs users to affiliate links for cosmetics and grooming products.
“I do believe that the standard I’ve acquired for what’s beautiful is impossible to achieve without spending thousands of dollars,” Danielle said, noting that her confidence decreased when she started using TikTok. “All of the people that I look at [on social media] and think are beautiful have gotten plastic surgery.”
Océane, 25, discovered Qoves via one of its beauty videos on YouTube, where it has more than 1m subscribers. Self-image was a longstanding concern for her: “I’ve always loved beauty, makeup and physical appearance, but I’ve never really liked my own image. I was always put down by my parents,” she said. “My mom wanted to pay for a nose job for me when I turned 18.” At school, kids bullied her. “They called me a dolphin because of my nose.”
Océane, who lives in France, paid an additional $80 for express delivery and received her results from Qoves in two days. It provided her a sense of relief: the report didn’t recommend any changes to her nose and otherwise “confirmed what I already knew about my flaws”, she said.
Dr Tracy Vaillancourt is a professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa and one of the many scholars Qoves cites in promotional materials. She expressed concern about the negative psychological impact of facial analysis services on self-esteem. “This is what women are most insecure about: their appearance,” she said. “There are going to be some who are told they look better than they thought and that’s great. Is that really going to be sustained over time?” In other words, can a service that emphasizes appearance as a metric of self-worth ever provide someone with lasting peace of mind, or does it perpetuate a cycle of self-criticism?
Moreover, though Qoves and Epica limit their services to adults aged 18 and up, the age restrictions are easy for minors to bypass. Qoves users are expected to self-report issues with self-image, with few guardrails in place to deter anyone with body dysmorphia disorder before they are presented with a menu of their flaws. “You can circumvent that so easily, it’s just going to give them the appearance of due diligence and making sure they’re not exploiting people who are vulnerable – but ultimately, they will be exploiting people who are vulnerable,” Vaillaincourt said. “These sorts of things are so destructive to people who have body dysmorphia, dysphoria, a history of eating disorders and people with low self-esteem.”
Qoves referenced Vaillancourt’s work in a video called The Cost of Being Too Pretty to show thatbeautiful women face jealousy from others. But Vaillancourt isn’t a scholar of beauty: she researches bullying, mental health and violence prevention. Though Qoves correctly interpreted her research on physical appearance and hostility, she is uneasy about research like hers being used for paid services like Qoves, that she believes have the capacity to harm women’s mental health.
Beyond Vaillancourt’s research, the applications of “science” used to back up these facial analysis services are shaky at best.
Qoves breaks down customers’ features based on “masculine and feminine facial qualities”, it explains in a video referencing a 2018 bulletin in the journal Frontiers of Psychology. Dr Justin Mogilski, psychology professor at the University of South Carolina Salkehatchie, co-authored the bulletin. However, his research was a limited view of how a group of primarily college-aged Americans perceived certain features as masculine or feminine.
“Do findings like mine generalize to every single population that makes up the world or a country? Or within every context where the attractiveness of a given feature can vary based on local ecology or culture? They do not,” Mogilski said. “So, would I make suggestions [for facial enhancements] based on our or anyone else’s data? I would not.”
Some services do not make any pretense of considering location or cultural standards in how they quantify beauty. On its website, Epica reports a commitment to diversity and inclusion, though it is unclear how its methodology reflects this – particularly as AI tools are increasingly criticized for perpetuating racial bias. Qoves insists its analyses are appropriate for all ethnicities, and says it will “consider unique facial traits and characteristics common to your demographic” when creating a report. In reality, as some people have pointed out online, its promotional materials often replicate Eurocentric conceptions of beauty: slim noses and large, double-lidded eyes for women, for example. As one person commented on a Qoves video breaking down Bangladeshi women’s faces: “What’s shown here seems to reflect a beauty ideal rather than the real diversity of Bangladeshi women.”
The lack of transparency around the methods and metrics the services use to measure attractiveness is its own issue. “These services owe it to their clients and themselves – if they want to be seen as credible – to be able to demonstrate scientifically” what their methods are, said Dr Mitch Brown, an assistant professor of psychological science at the University of Arkansas who has studied the science of attraction for over a decade. According to experts such as Brown, the available literature on attractiveness is too heterogenous, making any universal, population-wide generalizations questionable. And, even if we know certain features are deemed as attractive by a specific community, are these findings lasting enough to justify changing one’s appearance? Are they sound enough to support a paid service’s recommendation?
“I don’t think the science is anywhere clear enough to do that. I would caution anyone against that,” Brown said.
In an email to the Guardian, Epic said: “We are unable to disclose proprietary information regarding our algorithmic methodologies, technical frameworks, or internal product development details.” It continued: “We continually review and refine our platform to ensure our services provide a supportive, fair and positive experience for all users.”
Qoves did not respond to a request for comment.
I purchased my own report with Qoves and uploaded my selfies to Epica to see what these tools really offered.
For Qoves, I was asked to check boxes confirming that I did not have “concerns related to body dysmorphic disorder” and would be comfortable receiving weight loss recommendations, and then asked to upload pictures of my face and side profile.
A couple of days later, Qoves presented me with an 18-tab analysis of each of my features, along with a 16-page “aesthetic protocol”, complete with a disturbing mockup of what my face would look like should I implement its recommendations: a healthy dose of lip filler, makeup and the overly tweezed eyebrows I sported in 10th grade.
For Epica, I was asked: how often do I use makeup? Do I want more control over my appearance? Instantly, I received a “skin health” score of 61%, with uneven texture highlighted as the main concern and a flood of serums advertised across my screen to fix it. I then moved to my couch, retook a selfie in the new lighting, and saw my skin health score jump to 81%.
Before receiving these reports, I had never considered whether my mouth was upturned or wide, or whether or not Botox at my ripe age of 26 would be beneficial. I had not considered “dark feminine” makeup styles as being my look. But now I found myself second-guessing what I saw in the mirror. Just how downturned did my mouth really look to those around me? How would Botox or a haul of new makeup change features I hadn’t previously been concerned about?
The language of looksmaxxing was in my head, and I didn’t like it.
“Ultimately, there are going to be implications for mental health,” Vaillancourt said, “and it’s going to be about social comparison: never feeling good enough, never achieving enough.”
