---
title: "Body Image"
description: "For a century the pressure to look a certain way arrived once a month on a magazine cover. Now it arrives every few seconds, personalised, and measured against faces that were never real."
url: https://attentionmachine.org/en/symptoms/body-image/
lang: en
updated: 2026-10-25
license: "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)"
---

# Body Image

For most of the last century, the pressure to look a certain way arrived about once a month, on the cover of a magazine. Now it arrives every few seconds — personalised, endless, and measured against faces that were never quite real to begin with.

## An old pressure, newly industrialised

The pressure to look a certain way is not new. Airbrushed covers and impossible standards are decades old. What changed is the scale and the constancy. The comparison used to be occasional; now it never stops. And the thing you are comparing yourself against is no longer a single retouched photograph but an endless reel of filtered, edited, best-of-everyone images. We are built to measure ourselves against the people around us — psychologists call it social comparison — and the feed turns that ordinary human instinct into a firehose.

> **Social comparison**
>
> Leon Festinger's 1954 observation that people work out their own worth by measuring themselves against others, and that we reach hardest for comparisons when we are unsure of ourselves. The instinct is normal and useful in a small community. A feed that shows you thousands of carefully curated lives and faces a day turns it into a source of near-constant, mostly unfavourable comparison.
>
> **Sources**
>
> - Festinger, L. (1954), [_A Theory of Social Comparison Processes_](https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202), Human Relations.

## What it does to girls

The feed rewards the most polished images, so that is what fills it. Filters quietly move the baseline: after enough of them, even your own unedited face can start to look wrong. Dove's own Self-Esteem Project research[^src-dove-self-esteem-2022] found that one in two girls say idealised beauty content on social media lowers how they feel about themselves, and seven in ten felt better after unfollowing it. It is worth noting who is saying this — Dove is a cosmetics brand owned by Unilever, a company describing a problem its own industry helps create — and that the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England[^src-centre-appearance], which studies the same effect, has co-created Dove's body-confidence programmes since 2014. But the direction of the findings matches independent research: a meta-analysis of 63 samples[^src-saiphoo-2019] found a small but significant link between social-media use and body-image disturbance.

## What it does to boys — "looksmaxxing"

We tend to assume body image is a girls' problem. It is not. Among boys, a parallel world has grown up around "looksmaxxing" — the project of maximising your attractiveness by any available means. At the soft end it is skincare, haircuts, and the gym, which is ordinary enough. At the hard end it becomes extreme and sometimes dangerous. Researchers at the University of Portsmouth[^src-university-portsmouth-2025] traced how the ideology of the "incel" world — the belief that looks rigidly decide a man's worth, and that male difficulties are owed primarily to women and feminism — has been quietly rebranded as "looksmaxxing" and "self-improvement," language palatable enough to slip past moderation and reach a much younger, wider audience.

> **Looksmaxxing**
>
> Online slang for maximising one's physical attractiveness. "Softmaxxing" covers ordinary grooming and fitness; "hardmaxxing" covers extreme measures. Solea and Sugiura (2025) document how the term, along with the pseudoscientific "PSL" attractiveness scale, is used to repackage misogynist "incel" ideology as neutral self-improvement so it spreads more easily on mainstream platforms.
>
> **Sources**
>
> - Solea, A.I. & Sugiura, L. (2025), [_Digital subcultural diffusion theory: rebranding the incel ideology through Looksmaxxing, Sub5s and the PSL scale_](https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590251387245), Crime, Media, Culture.

## When it turns dangerous — "bonesmashing"

At the far end of hardmaxxing is "bonesmashing": people striking their own faces with hard objects, in the belief that the small fractures will heal into a sharper jaw. It rests on a misreading of a real idea — that bone adapts to stress. Maxillofacial surgeons have warned, in their specialty's journal and in the press[^src-fike-2026], that it does not reshape the face; it risks broken facial bones, nerve damage[^src-lai-2026], dental injury, a changed bite and asymmetric healing. Writing to the Journal of Stomatology, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Dr Ricardo Grillo[^src-grillo-2024] called the trend an urgent concern. If any of this is touching you or someone you know, there is a note on where to find help at the foot of the page.

## Same machine, two faces

Girls and boys are caught by the same mechanism wearing two masks. A feed that rewards the most extreme appearance content, because extremity holds attention. A culture that turns self-improvement into a game — rating faces out of ten, chasing a "score" — borrowing the same [gamification](https://attentionmachine.org/en/attention-machine/gamification/) the rest of the machine runs on. And underneath both, social comparison at a scale no magazine could ever manage. No one designed the feed to make you dislike your own face. It simply learned that content about not being good enough holds attention, and served more of it. No conspiracy. Only incentives. The thread runs straight into [mental health](https://attentionmachine.org/en/symptoms/mental-health/), the [market in insecurity](https://attentionmachine.org/en/symptoms/consumerism/), and [the manosphere](https://attentionmachine.org/en/symptoms/manosphere/), the worldview that attributes male difficulties primarily to women and feminism.

**What the evidence says — the contested causation, and where to get help**

**The correlation is consistent; causation is still argued.** A large body of research[^src-saiphoo-2019] links heavy social-media use to body dissatisfaction in both girls and boys — a small effect, found repeatedly. As with the wider [mental-health](https://attentionmachine.org/en/symptoms/mental-health/) debate, proving that the feed _causes_ the harm — rather than unhappy people using it more — is harder, and remains contested. The early studies were of adolescent girls: in 2013 Tiggemann and Slater[^src-tiggemann-2013] found that Facebook users scored higher than non-users on every measure of body-image concern, and Meier and Gray[^src-meier-2014] found that time spent on its photo features, not time on the site, went with weight dissatisfaction and the drive for thinness. Both are correlations. We are careful not to overclaim it.

**What clinicians do recognise.** Eating disorders are badly under-recognised in boys and men; the largest US epidemiological survey of eating disorders (Hudson and colleagues, 2007[^src-hudson-2007]) found men made up roughly a third of the lifetime cases it counted, which is part of why the looksmaxxing world has gone so long without being taken seriously as a health issue.

**If you need support.** Struggles with body image, disordered eating, or the urge to harm yourself are common and treatable, and you do not have to work through them alone. The [National Alliance for Eating Disorders](https://www.allianceforeatingdisorders.com) runs a free helpline and referral service staffed by clinicians. Talking to a doctor or someone you trust is a good first step.

## Sources

[^src-festinger-1954]: Festinger, L. (1954), [_A Theory of Social Comparison Processes_](https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202), Human Relations.

[^src-solea-2025]: Solea, A.I. & Sugiura, L. (2025), [_Digital subcultural diffusion theory: rebranding the incel ideology through Looksmaxxing, Sub5s and the PSL scale_](https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590251387245), Crime, Media, Culture.

[^src-university-portsmouth-2025]: University of Portsmouth (2025), [Why incel social media accounts are encouraging young people towards extreme looksmaxxing procedures](https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/news/why-incel-social-media-accounts-are-encouraging-young-people-towards-extreme-looksmaxxing-procedures).

[^src-grillo-2024]: Grillo, R. (2024), [_Urgent concern regarding "bone smashing", a dangerous trend on TikTok_](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jormas.2024.101783), Journal of Stomatology, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.

[^src-fike-2026]: Fike, A. (1 March 2026), [Gen Z Is Looksmaxxing by 'Bonesmashing' Their Faces](https://www.vice.com/en/article/gen-z-is-looksmaxxing-by-bonesmashing-their-faces/), VICE — oral and maxillofacial surgeon Lee Kojanis: it "does not reliably improve appearance; it increases the risk of fractures, dental injury, and long-term complications", and makes "asymmetric healing much more likely".

[^src-lai-2026]: Lai, A. (27 March 2026), [Dangerous 'bonesmashing' social media trend raises alarm among doctors](https://health.yahoo.com/your-body/first-aid-safety/articles/dangerous-bonesmashing-social-media-trend-030158095.html), CBS 8 (syndicated on Yahoo Health) — oral and maxillofacial surgeon Young Jun: bone remodels over time but not through repeated impact; "you could break your face, facial bones, your cheekbone", with "nerve damages" and "bite changes".

[^src-saiphoo-2019]: Saiphoo, A.N. & Vahedi, Z. (2019), [_A meta-analytic review of the relationship between social media use and body image disturbance_](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.07.028), Computers in Human Behavior 101, 259–275.

[^src-dove-self-esteem-2022]: Dove Self-Esteem Project (27 April 2022), [_A new study from the Dove Self-Esteem Project finds 1 in 2 girls say idealized beauty advice on social media causes low self-esteem_](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/a-new-study-from-the-dove-self-esteem-project-finds-1-in-2-girls-say-idealized-beauty-advice-on-social-media-causes-low-self-esteem-301533873.html) — online survey by Edelman DXI of 1,551 girls aged 10–17 in the US, February–April 2022: 1 in 2 say idealised beauty content lowers their self-esteem; 7 in 10 felt better after unfollowing it (brand-funded; see note in text).

[^src-hudson-2007]: Hudson, J.I., Hiripi, E., Pope, H.G. & Kessler, R.C. (2007), [_The Prevalence and Correlates of Eating Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication_](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2006.03.040), Biological Psychiatry 61(3), 348–358 — the NCS-R lifetime prevalence estimates by sex.

[^src-tiggemann-2013]: Tiggemann, M. & Slater, A. (2013), [_NetGirls: The Internet, Facebook, and body image concern in adolescent girls_](https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.22141), International Journal of Eating Disorders 46(6), 630–633 — 1,087 girls aged 13–15.

[^src-meier-2014]: Meier, E.P. & Gray, J. (2014), [_Facebook Photo Activity Associated with Body Image Disturbance in Adolescent Girls_](https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2013.0305), Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 17(4), 199–206 (online November 2013).

[^src-centre-appearance]: Centre for Appearance Research, University of the West of England, [_Dove Self-Esteem Project (DSEP)_](https://www.uwe.ac.uk/research/centres-and-groups/appearance/research/dove) — the Centre's partnership with Dove since 2014: body-confidence tools “co-created by CAR and Dove”.

[^src-national-alliance]: [National Alliance for Eating Disorders](https://www.allianceforeatingdisorders.com) — helpline and referral service.

[What you can do →](https://attentionmachine.org/en/educate/what-to-do/)\
[Where to get help →](https://attentionmachine.org/en/educate/get-help/)\
[Xenophobia & Violence →](https://attentionmachine.org/en/symptoms/xenophobia/)\
[The Manosphere →](https://attentionmachine.org/en/symptoms/manosphere/)\
[Yes, but… →](https://attentionmachine.org/en/objections/)

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