Aesthetic pseudoscience is the beauty trend we want to leave behind in 2024

With its 40 muscles, the face is the most expressive part of our body and reveals much more than we imagine. It provides clues about our health and emotions. For example, a certain paleness or dark circles under the eyes may indicate an iron deficiency, while furrowed brows can signify worry. Compressed lips paired with jaw tension may express anger. A growing number of people also believe that the face is not just an external manifestation of what is happening internally, but that the color, shape, size, and prominence of its features reflect a person's morality and intelligence. To quote Roald Dahl, “A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.” This appears to be the guiding principle behind many of TikTok’s latest beauty trends, which, under the guise of choosing the right makeup, force us to analyze the height of our forehead, the symmetry of our eyebrows, the distance between our eyes, the prominence of our cheekbones, the size of our nose, or the fullness of our lips, playing with long-discredited pseudosciences like phrenology, and physiognomy.

2024 Beauty TikTok Trends with Problematic Implications

How many times this past year, while scrolling through TikTok, have we come across suggestions on how to do our makeup and look more attractive based on measurements and types of nose, mouth, eyes, and other distinctive facial features? We’re not talking about the usual Golden Ratio of Beauty Phi, which suggests that an individual’s beauty is determined by facial symmetry, mentioned whenever the world’s most beautiful women and men are named. Content abounds urging us to scrutinize, dissect, and analyze every centimeter of our faces almost ruthlessly, prompting questions like “Am I girl pretty or boy pretty?”, “Do I have a high visual weight or a low visual weight?” or encouraging us to measure the tilt of the Canthal Tilt, the angle of the eyes relative to the face. If our tilt is negative, we are deemed unattractive; if positive, we can pride ourselves on being attractive.

These trends prey on and amplify our insecurities, leading us to hyper-fixate on our perceived flaws and pushing women toward a conventionally hot beauty standard that is preferably cisgender, white, thin, with a perfect Instagram Face, aligned with the algorithm and rooted in patriarchy, where the only acceptable differences are hair and eyeshadow color. Think of the content that divides archetypes into mermaid, fairy, vampire, or witch. Whether it’s distinguishing between “siren eyes,” “angel skull” or “witch skull,” many of these trends categorize and ruthlessly limit people’s features. This continuous practice of amateur and irrational face reading has much more problematic and sinister implications, as it revives and reaffirms aesthetic pseudosciences like physiognomy and phrenology, historically used as a basis for scientific racism and eugenics, supported by white supremacy enthusiasts, contemporary far-right groups, and even public figures like Elon Musk, who recently endorsed the idea of a correlation between skull size and intelligence.

The Return of Aesthetic Pseudosciences

On TikTok, trends and seemingly lighthearted content disguised as makeup tips are multiplying, claiming through face reading and skeletal structure analysis to establish a link between beauty and morality, as if the outer self somehow reflects the inner self. Unfortunately, this concept has traveled through history to the present day, popular not only among incel and femcel communities or on troll forums like 4Chan, where phrases like “physiognomy never lies” are a lofty way of calling someone ugly and mentally flawed simultaneously. For example, as reported by Dazed Digital, a 2021 study exploring the stereotype that “beauty is good” found that attractive individuals are perceived as possessing greater morality and trustworthiness than unattractive ones. Memes, facial filters, entertaining and engaging content exploit the glow-up culture and looksmaxing to reaffirm pseudosciences like physiognomy and phrenology.

What are Physiognomy and Phrenology?

The Canthal Tilt, angel skull, and Sanpaku eyes are all modern examples of physiognomy, a term derived from the Greek words physis (nature) and gnosis (knowledge), referring to a correlation between a person’s physical characteristics, particularly facial features, and their character, moral qualities, and intelligence. Already widespread in ancient Greece and theorized by Plato and Aristotle, it supported the idea that physical beauty equated to moral goodness. It was Swiss writer and philosopher Johann Kaspar Lavater who made this discipline very popular, giving it a more ethnological purpose than his predecessors, which found resonance in the emerging nationalist ideologies of that period, legitimizing horrors like Eurocentrism, colonialism, slavery, racial superiority, and genocide. Let us not forget Cesare Lombroso, who, building on physiognomy, claimed that the origin of criminal behavior was inherent in the anatomical characteristics of delinquents. In other words, a certain type of nose or chin determined socially deviant behavior.

The principles of phrenology, derived from the Greek words phren (mind) and logos (study), were established by German physician Franz Joseph Gall at the end of the 19th century. While at university, Gall observed that students with good memories all had prominent eyes, leading him to conclude that the part of the brain responsible for memory was located behind the eyes. From this, he formalized the idea that the mind and brain were one and the same, with different areas of the brain corresponding to distinct functions, which, in turn, were reflected in the shape of the head. Doesn't this bring to mind TikTok's "angel skull versus witch skull" trend, which claims that individuals with upturned noses and prominent chins fall into the first category, while those with recessed jaws and chins belong to the latter?

Why Are These Aesthetic Pseudosciences So Fascinating?

The belief that one can deduce an individual’s character from their physical appearance is a historically pervasive phenomenon, evident in Aristotelian treatises and ancient China, where it was known as Mian Xiang. Even though physiognomy and phrenology, alongside other disciplines like craniometry and anthropometry, have consistently supported the supposed superiority of white people, Eurocentrism, class distinctions, and patriarchy, they remain part of cultural discourse. Why do we still refer to them? Perhaps we crave categories, visible markers that help us understand ourselves, others, and the world. Or maybe these ideas, though long debunked, have deeply infiltrated our thinking, influencing us even subconsciously. Cranial and nasal height measurements were once taken from Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Yet, today we use similar concepts to trace eyeliner, decide where to apply blush, and conform to certain beauty standards. Wanting to enhance our features and feel good about ourselves is entirely legitimate, but confusion persists, tempting us to assign personality traits or moral qualities to physical features like eyes, noses, eyebrows, or other characteristics. We forget that behind algorithmic suggestions lie deeply rooted human biases, stereotypes that can lead us down a slippery slope toward horrific historical events. Isn’t it time to leave phrenology and physiognomy in the past? Packaging these pseudosciences in an aesthetically pleasing manner doesn’t make them any more valid—or less dangerous.