The science of beauty: Looksmaxxing, self-help, and genetic fatalism in women’s online spaces

This paper examines the emergence of “looksmaxxing” in women’s online spaces. As a specific and underexamined element within what Jilly Boyce Kay analyzes as “reactionary feminism,” essentialist logics about gender and race are operationalized through the aesthetics of science and self-optimization rather than explicitly political rhetoric. Users construct the “science of beauty” through decentralized forms of expertise, from plastic surgery influencers to scientific racism to community-generated aesthetic taxonomies. We identify a thread of individualized and intimate genetic fatalism shaping both aesthetic frameworks and the tactics used to achieve them, mutating the postfeminist promise of self-transformation toward distinctly reactionary goals. This tension between the essentialism and malleability of the body makes the paradigm generative and self-sustaining, absorbing failure and keeping users invested. This case is a call to examine “fringe” and aesthetics-focused cultural formations for insight on how bioessentialist ideas about race and gender circulate today.