Looksmaxxing Apps: A Growing Threat to Adolescent Mental Health

A new wave of AI-driven looksmaxxing apps is sparking alarm among mental health experts, who warn that these tools are exploiting young men’s insecurities and promoting harmful beauty standards. The apps, which analyze facial features and assign attractiveness scores, have gained traction among teenage boys, with some apps like Umax being downloaded an estimated 200,000 times in a single month. Clinicians, including psychiatry professor Gene Beresin, MD, report seeing a rise in adolescent boys whose obsession with their appearance leads to serious physical and mental health issues, such as eating disorders and body dysmorphia. ## The Science of Attractiveness-or the Illusion of It? These apps present attractiveness as an objective, measurable trait, assigning numerical scores to facial features like canthal tilt, jawline sharpness, and facial harmony. Unlike subjective opinions, these scores are framed as scientific, making them harder to dismiss. One app, PSL, breaks down the face into roughly 30 metrics, including orbital depth, maxilla, and facial width-to-height ratio, mimicking the appearance of a medical assessment without any clinical validation. The apps promise users they can achieve "top-tier attractiveness" in just 90 days-if they subscribe. The problem, experts say, is that these apps lack transparency about how their scoring systems work or whether they’ve been tested for accuracy. Instead, they follow a marketing playbook: define an ideal, measure users against it, highlight their deficiencies, and then sell a solution. The apps also fail to account for diversity, often promoting Eurocentric beauty standards that may not resonate with users from different racial or ethnic backgrounds. A 2024 study found that beauty filters on social media apps consistently reshape features toward these narrow norms, raising concerns about how such tools affect young people’s self-perception. ## A Matter of Health Equity and Safety Beyond the mental health risks, these apps raise questions about health equity. Research has shown that commercial facial analysis tools misclassify the gender of darker-skinned women at much higher rates than lighter-skinned men, suggesting biases in the algorithms. For LGBTQ+ youth, who already face high rates of body dissatisfaction, these apps may exacerbate feelings of inadequacy. The Trevor Project found that in 2023, 87% of LGBTQ+ youth reported body dissatisfaction, with those dissatisfied having twice the odds of a past-year suicide attempt compared to those who were satisfied with their bodies. The lack of age verification is another concern. While some states, like Texas, are moving to require age checks for minors downloading apps, federal regulation is needed to ensure accountability. Experts argue that any app scoring attractiveness or "genetic potential" should be required to disclose how its scoring system works, how it was validated, and on whose faces it was built. Without such oversight, these apps could continue to prey on vulnerable youth, reinforcing harmful stereotypes and contributing to a mental health crisis.