This week, we’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of Highsnobiety Beauty. For a year now, we’ve platformed stories about everything from Gen Z’s plastic surgery paradigm to perfume’s emotional power. “Beauty” is so much more than an aesthetic standard or the products we use — it’s culture, politics, and personal style. Over the next three days, we’re rolling out a special series that captures beauty’s many faces.

Naomi, 23, is five-foot-four with blue eyes and dark hair. She has long eyelashes and full lips. She considers her looks above-average — after all, she receives a decent amount of attention when she goes out and doesn’t have any trouble getting dates. But Naomi suspects that something about her face doesn’t measure up. She doesn’t look as good in photos as her favorite influencers do. Maybe it’s her cheekbones — should she get filler for a more chiseled look? When she asks friends and family for their opinion, they say she’s beautiful the way she is. When she posts selfies, they’re just as effusive: Gorgeous! Slay! Fire emoji!

So how can Naomi find out what people really think about the way she looks? She can post her photo on r/TrueRateMe, a Reddit forum (or “subreddit” in Internet parlance) that, in its own words, “provides facial ratings of both men and women based on *objective factors* such as harmony, sexual dimorphism, symmetry, and qualities of their features.” 

“Reality is, there is pretty privilege,” says Ettealways, a member of r/TrueRateMe who asked that I refer to him by his username. His involvement in the group has earned him a “Trusted Rater” user flair, a tag that differentiates the group’s newbies from its experts. “It’s good to know if you have [pretty privilege] or not, because the people close to you won’t have the guts to tell you.”

Naomi is not a real person — she’s a character crafted for the purposes of this story — but her circumstances reflect those of real r/TrueRateMe members I spoke to off the record, who are acutely aware of the financial and social advantages often awarded to conventionally attractive people. Members of r/TrueRateMe dole out ratings with the intention of helping people, just like the fictitious Naomi, learn the “truth” about their looks. Armed with knowledge about what’s “wrong” with them, they can then work to improve their physical features and bump up their score. In turn, they can enjoy the benefits of being good-looking: getting better job opportunities, more elevated positions in social circles, and higher-caliber dates.

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Ettealways is right: Your friends and family probably aren’t the best source for honest, unfiltered feedback on your appearance. When you share your new haircut on Instagram, your aunt won’t tell you it’s too short. When you try out a makeup routine on TikTok, your BFF won’t say blue eyeshadow clashes with your skin tone. “Social media sites are places to perform closeness,” says sociologist Carrie James, whose research focuses on young people’s digital lives. “That often plays out through over-the-top praise and compliments in response to posts.” As an increasing portion of our lives takes place online, it becomes nearly impossible to escape the unrelenting positivity of performative closeness. 

“There aren’t a lot of spaces online where you can get unbiased opinions on yourself,” one r/TrueRateMe member, who asked that I refer to her as Sarah, tells me over the phone. “If you post amongst your friends and family, of course they’re going to hype you up. It’s kind of a knee-jerk reaction to be positive about what people post. I do feel that’s what initially drew me to r/TrueRateMe — the thought that I can actually get unbiased feedback about myself.”

In other words, r/TrueRateMe, founded in 2017 or thereabouts, has created a space for people to discuss prettiness in a world that both adores it and avoids it. To Claire Saguy, a college senior writing a science-fiction novel inspired by r/TrueRateMe, beauty is “unspoken,” which, in some ways, makes it even more pervasive. “You can’t escape it.”

Whether we want to admit it or not, looks matter. “There are different returns on the range of appearances that we see,” says Alka Menon, an assistant professor of sociology at Yale University and the author of Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards. The problem (or one of many problems) with r/TrueRateMe is how “looks” are defined: Eurocentric beauty standards rule its “objective” rating system, which, despite what r/TrueRateMe purports, isn’t backed by any hard data or real science. 

These shortcomings aren’t lost on many of the r/TrueRateMe members I spoke to. Nonetheless, they’re seduced by what the group signifies. For hundreds of thousands of Reddit users, r/TrueRateMe provides an answer to the age-old question: Is there a universal standard for beauty? And more importantly, how do I compare?

A one versus a nine

It was the Ancient Greeks who first attempted to quantify human beauty. Polykleitos’ Canon, published circa 450 BCE, stipulated ideal proportions for the human body (for example, one’s height should be seven heads in length). One hundred and fifty years later, Euclid’s Elements put forth the concept of the “golden ratio,” said to manifest in faces we perceive as aesthetically pleasing. Following in the footsteps of Polykleitos and Euclid (and countless others in between), plastic surgeons and evolutionary psychologists went on to create “facial canons” specifying ideal anthropometric measurements such as the length of the philtrum (the groove between the base of the nose and upper lip) and canthal tilt (the angle between the inner and outer corner of the eye).

Though r/TrueRateMe doesn’t claim specific intellectual antecedents, a line from the thinking of the Ancient Greeks and the plastic surgeons can easily be drawn. r/TrueRateMe bases its ratings on a bell-curved scale ranging from zero to 10. According to its “Wiki” section, “about 60% of people are within 1 standard deviation of the mean” — in other words, most users receive ratings between a four and six. There are two rating guides used, one for men and one for women, to help users visualize this scale. According to the guides, models Adriana Lima and Tim Chung are 9.5s (“ultra attractive, super top model tier”); Saoirse Ronan and Alex Rodriguez are 5s (“average”); and Sandra Oh and William Hung are 3s (“unattractive”). Two additional documents, men’s and women’s “Advanced Rating Primers,” stipulate optimal facial measurements: For example, a woman’s eyes should have a positive canthal tilt between seven and 10 degrees; a man’s lips should be 1.42 to 1.618 times wider than his nose. 

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Beauty, this system posits, is objective and can be judged without emotion or personal preference. Ratings and feedback thus read like medical reports: “5… Bizygomatic width being too large is the main flaw.” “3.3. Main flaws are the chin length, maxilla and very steep jaw frontal angle.” “5.8 top 20% and very attractive… buccal fat pulls the rating down a bit. Provided you maintain a healthy weight and lifestyle, your face will likely become leaner in the next few years.”

When interacting with r/TrueRateMe, members must observe a long list of rules: No overtly racist and sexual comments; no comments that don’t include ratings derived from the official scale and guide. “Underrating” or “rate inflating” merits a warning, and multiple warnings will result in a permanent ban. The group’s moderators are tasked with enforcing these rules, which in turn helps maintain the integrity of the rating system — and the position, held by members and moderators, that the group deals in unbiased science. 

“If you show someone an example of a 1 and a 9, essentially everyone would be able to tell who’s more attractive,” says one TRM member, who requested to be referred to as ODR. Ettealways says the group’s rating system is “supposed to be based off of who would be the most successful supermodel.” He considers r/TrueRateMe a “good starting place,” adding that “it’s the only place on the Internet that will get you somewhat close to an objective truth.”

r/TrueRateMe, home to 263,000 members, is Reddit’s 20th-most-popular beauty and grooming subreddit at the time of writing. For Ettealways, who says he is a straight, 36-year-old married man located in the Southeast US, the group provides a sense of social connection and purpose. “The most rewarding is when someone goes on [r/TrueRateMe], we give them advice, and they take the advice,” he says. “I’ve seen people go from 4.5 up to six, just from losing 20 pounds of body fat. That’s exciting.”

Advice like this, he believes, can change someone’s life for the better. “Let’s say you have a Habsburg jaw and you are a 3 — that could be useful information. If your life goal is to be a private-jet salesman for Gulfstream, it probably isn’t going to go very well for you when you look considerably worse than most of the population. Does that make it right or fair? No, not at all,” he says. “Sometimes the truth hurts.”

“Truth” and “science”

There’s no denying the existence of universally desirable physical traits. But these traits — such as clear skin, full hair, and relative facial symmetry — do more to indicate the absence of disease or deformity, defined as the acquired or congenital distortion of an organ or body part, than speak to an individual’s attractiveness. “The aspects of beauty that are considered objective are basically just what a normal human body is,” says Jacque Lynn Foltyn, a professor of sociology at National University. 

While it’s true that the vast majority of people would agree that, say, the famously idiosyncratic-looking Wallace Shawn is less attractive than the famously handsome David Beckham, the r/TrueRateMe rhetoric begins to break down as soon as you compare people whom the guides deem close in attractiveness. Take, for example, the actors Nina Dobrev (6.5) and Brie Larson (5.5) — there isn’t likely to be resounding agreement over who of the pair is more attractive. Similarly, there’s no objective truth to whether model Ming Xi’s canthal tilt is “too positive” at 15 degrees and therefore less attractive than Priyanka Chopra’s, which falls somewhere between an “ideal” seven to 10 degrees. Or, for instance, that Julia Roberts’ upper lip, which is larger than her lower lip (“unideal,” according to r/TrueRateMe), detracts from her beauty. 

Like facial canons used by plastic surgeons, r/TrueRateMe offers a one-size-fits-all rating system: Apply certain agreed-upon ratios and angles to any face to find out where it aligns, and doesn’t align, with a “beautiful” one. The problem is, these canons are also fundamentally flawed. According to Foltyn, they’re, in part, based on data culled from small groups of undergraduate students (sample sizes rarely exceed 40 participants) attending university in the US and the UK. “[Evolutionary psychologists] will show undergraduates pictures of celebrities and ask them, ‘Who is the most beautiful?’” Using photos, these researchers will then measure the facial features of the celebrities their students deemed most attractive. 

In 2021, the majority of the US’ and the UK’s undergraduate population was white, not to mention the fact that both countries are, as Foltyn writes in her 2016 work The Pseudoscience of Beauty: Facts and Myths, “advanced industrialized nations, sharing a global village of fashion, beauty, and pop culture images” that tend to value Eurocentric features.

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Michael Rembis, associate professor of history at New York’s University at Buffalo, agrees. “Many of these researchers are at universities, so they only use college kids in their studies — that’s how these [facial] measurements get created,” he says. “They think they’re doing objective scientific research, but their research is very culturally laden… They’re essentially interviewing white, middle-class college kids.”

r/TrueRateMe’s own members admit that the group’s rhetoric is imperfect, to put it lightly. “[Beauty] can be quantified to an extent, but personal preference undoubtedly comes up,” says Ettealways. In his opinion, the women r/TrueRateMe’s rating guide deems 9s and 9.5s are “too skinny and almost alien… not especially good-looking.” 

And, as another Trusted Rater who requested I refer to her by her pseudonym, Ava, put it, “There is more to attraction than appearance, obviously.” She tells me over Reddit message that she’s dating someone older who would be “considered average-looking or even below-[average],” but whom she, clearly, finds attractive. “Appearance often attracts someone initially, but other factors affect whether that attraction grows or fades.”

Ava’s r/TrueRateMe rating doesn’t match her own perception of her looks. “My rating was around 5.5, which is considered above-average [on the r/TrueRateMe scale]. I have seen people I consider much less attractive than myself scoring higher,” she says, adding that her looks often garner her IRL “attention” and the occasional modeling job. Ava, who describes herself as “half-Middle Eastern and half-Native American,” believes her ethnic background may have influenced her score. “I have slightly more distinctive features and not the typical Eurocentric look, despite being fair-skinned with hazel eyes. I think that people with sharper features photograph better than those with more rounded features, which tend to show at their best in real life. There is a certain ‘3Dness’ needed to fully appreciate features like mine.”

Ettealways, who estimates he’s given over 2,000 ratings, acknowledges the slippery territory that r/TrueRateMe treads, from the Eurocentricity of its rating guides and primers to the effect it might have on young, impressionable users. “I don’t think it’s a great thing to go on there and have people pick apart the little flaws that you have in your face,” he says. “I don’t know that that really helps people, unless they’re at either extreme end. [If] you think, ‘Hey, I think I could be a supermodel,’ then it would be good to post yourself there. But for average, everyday people, I don’t think it’s terribly helpful.”

History repeats itself

The link between r/TrueRateMe guides and the so-called quantifiable beauty standards set out by Ancient Greeks and plastic surgeons is fairly obvious. Less obvious, though perhaps more significant, is the link between r/TrueRateMe and efforts by early anthropologists to classify and rank human traits. These 19th-century anthropologists measured physical features of different global populations with the goal of characterizing, and in many cases subjugating, entire groups of people. It was this practice that helped birth anthropometry, the collection and correlation of measurements of the human body. 

While anthropometry can, in some cases, be a valuable tool for studying human difference, the practice has long been misused to promote the sort of “race science” echoed by the eugenics movement — broadly, a movement that sought to control the reproduction of “fit” and “unfit” people — birthed by Francis Galton in the late 19th century. “Galton was an adamant counter, an adamant statistician,” Rembis says. “He believed that everything could be quantified, including human traits, and ultimately decided that humans could breed better humans.” 

In the 1830s, Samuel George Morton, an American anthropologist whose beliefs profoundly influenced eugenic thought, began measuring the skull size of different populations in an attempt to prove that Caucasians were intellectually superior to non-white races. A century later, eugenicist Charles Davenport embarked on a 12-year-long study at Tuskegee Institute during which the Eugenics Record Office, a eugenic research institute, took annual body measurements from the school’s all-Black student population to help create a standard for racial typology. Around the same time, Wickliffe Draper founded the Pioneer Fund, which promoted what he and his proponents called “racial hygiene” and “eugenic fitness” — terms used to describe the belief that “superior races” should not reproduce with those “inferior” to them.

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Wendy Kline, a professor of medical history at Purdue University and the author of Building a Better Race, notes that the “hierarchical standardizing” of physical appearance didn’t exist prior to the eugenics movement. “Once [beauty and intelligence] are seen as indicators of something, you have these progressive-era scientists coming in and trying to quantify them. By doing so, they automatically create this notion of a spectrum — there’s superiority and inferiority,” Kline says. “At the heart of it is the desire to quantify whiteness and beauty as an indicator of superiority.”

Eugenics and anthropometric fields like phrenology (the measurement of the cranium to predict intelligence and personality traits) are now considered pseudosciences that have been, as Menon says, “widely discredited.” But their attitudes and thinking persist, traceable across beauty norms around the globe and in groups like r/TrueRateMe, which claim to classify and rank physical attributes in the name of science. “I don’t mean to say that r/TrueRateMe is a eugenic project, but I do think these things are definitely influenced by the legacies of eugenics,” Rembis says. Kline echoes his sentiments: “I wouldn’t say this group is inherently eugenic. But by not thinking about the implications of promoting this standard of beauty and suggesting there’s a scientific validity to it, it runs the risk of repeating similar mistakes.” 

At least one longstanding r/TrueRateMe moderator (he’s held the role since 2018), who requests to go by TRMMod, sees no relation between eugenics and the sort of anthropometric measurements r/TrueRateMe uses to rate members. “Eugenics is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits,” he says. “All we do is evaluate facial beauty objectively.”

The elephant in the chat room

It’s impossible to discuss the importance of looks in today’s culture without discussing technology. “Rate me” websites have existed since the dawn of social media — the most famous example is Mark Zuckerberg’s FaceMash, a site that allowed Harvard University students to judge the attractiveness of their classmates. Launched in 2003, FaceMash was preceded by Hotornot.com, created by James Hong and Jim Young in 2000; the point was to let users submit photos of themselves that others rated on a scale of one to 10. In the 2010s, young girls began flooding YouTube with videos asking: Am I pretty?  

Even dating apps like Tinder and Hinge can be considered a form of “rate me” social media — users are prompted to evaluate potential partners largely based on photos of their face and body. For frustrated singles, r/TrueRateMe might offer answers to why they were “swiped left” on. 

Though it bans all use of incel terminology, r/TrueRateMe could easily be grouped with incel culture, too. “Involuntary celibates,” men who consider themselves unable to sexually attract women (and believe women are to blame for their perceived shortcomings), are notoriously preoccupied with improving their physical appearance. They openly loathe women, but they still want to attract them — the only way to do this, they believe, is to appear more conventionally attractive via “looksmaxxing,” or maximizing one’s looks. Now-defunct online forums like Sluthate.com, Lookism.net, and Puahate.com (all frequented by incels) were rife with discussion of male beauty standards and looksmaxxing techniques like skincare routines, fitness regimens, and plastic surgery. 

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At the core of incel ideology is the notion that physical attractiveness is genetically predetermined. You can augment your appearance by dressing or grooming yourself a certain way, but your baseline looks are written into your DNA — a belief that parallels r/TrueRateMe’s rating primers, which measure beauty using genetically determined features like jaw angle, canthal tilt, and nasofrontal angle.

While TRMMod admits there may have once been crossover between r/TrueRateMe and the incel community before he joined the group (“I have no personal knowledge of that,” he says), he’s adamant that the group is, in its current form at least, staunchly anti-incel. The members of r/TrueRateMe that I spoke to while reporting this story were unyieldingly polite and well-spoken — the opposite, or so one would expect, of hate-filled misogynists. According to multiple sources I spoke with, about half of the group’s moderators are women (I wasn’t able to get in touch with any of them, however). TRMMod claims that the subreddit’s membership is similarly split and spans a wide range of races and ethnicities.

It’s personal

In its quest to “scientize” human beauty, r/TrueRateMe unwittingly exposes its fundamental shortcomings: Despite what its members would like us to believe, there is no hard science behind the rating guide, nor its belief in a universal standard of beauty.

Our perceptions of beauty are subjective, shaped by culture and emotion, and vary from person to person. Sure, you can measure people’s jaw and eye angles and determine how close they are to the figures in r/TrueRateMe’s rating primers — but that hardly indicates whether they would be considered attractive by any given person in the real world. 

“In my own research, I compare how cosmetic surgeons decide ideal or appropriate appearances for people in the United States and in Malaysia,” Menon says. “When I talked to surgeons in both countries at professional societies, they confirmed that in the United States, they sold larger breast volumes for implants than they did in Malaysia.” According to Menon, Americans value large breasts as beautiful. But in Malaysia, breast reductions are more common, as are “smaller volume implants.” 

Menon has also observed plastic surgeons moving away from things like the golden ratio and other facial canon measurements. “If you applied this kind of framework to anybody who walked in the door, it would lead to negative outcomes.” The surgeons she spoke to while researching Refashioning Race “felt like they needed to rethink what facial canons could do, what measurements could do, and to think much more about tailoring to the specific bodies and specific people in front of them.”

Beauty and attraction cannot be boiled down to angles and equations. The lilt of a person’s voice, the jokes she tells, or the way his eyes might resemble your mother’s — these are all things that add to (or detract from, depending on the context) someone’s beauty. To reduce what pleases us to a series of numbers and proportions is a joyless task that turns us all into lifeless automatons, unable to appreciate the unknown, the un-dictated. The ability to view the world through our own experiences, tastes, and knowledge is what makes us sentient, after all — it’s what makes us human.