2024 was the year aesthetic pseudoscience made an ugly comeback

Are you boy pretty or girl pretty? Are you a deer, bunny, jellyfish, cat or dog? Have you got high or low visual weight? Do you have a dramatic, natural, classic, gamine, or romantic body type? Are you a bug, fish or alien? What about your canthal tilt–positive or negative? How’s your facial harmony? Do you have high or low visual contrast?

Maybe you’ve come across some of the above circulating on TikTok, Reddit and Instagram over the past year or so. They’re all ways to dissect the colour, shape, size and prominence of features. High visual weight, for example, means you have large facial features that stand out. A high contrast face has a dramatic difference between the colour of skin, hair and eyes. Many of these function as ways to enhance your make-up, or decide whether gold or silver jewellery suits you better. Fun, right? But there’s an insidious side to these analytical trends. Many of them play into the sketchy pseudoscience of phrenology and physiognomy. 

Phrenology, the study of the skull predicting mental traits, was big during the Victorian era. The contours of scalps were read like palms to try to understand personality traits, leading to things like 19th-century doctors mistakenly believing they’d be able to look at faces and pick out criminals. Phrenology was debunked by the 1840s, but it seems these ideas haven’t been fully left in the past. Just look at the ‘angel versus witch skull’ TikTok concept: ‘angel’ skulls supposedly have upturned noses and protruding chins, while a ‘witch’ skull has a recessed jaw and chin (the latter, it’s implied, is less desirable). Since racial groups can be linked to physical characteristics, dividing skull shapes into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ categories is wading into very dangerous territory.

Physiognomy, meanwhile, is an idea that’s been around since Ancient Greece – and, like phrenology, has also been discredited. This concept (which has been rebranded as ‘face-reading’ on TikTok) is the study of a person’s facial features or expression and what that says about their character. Think of that famous Roald Dahl illustration, which says “a person who has good thoughts can never be ugly.” Metaphorically, there might be a positive sentiment in there, but it’s ultimately problematic: beauty being linked with morality is a deeply entrenched idea that continues to shape the way people are perceived despite our appearances being, genetically, completely out of our control.

‘Sanpaku eyes’, which have visible whites underneath the iris, is another idea that’s gained traction online. A superstition with ancient origins in Japan, it suggests those who have them are destined for tragic lives (examples given are as varied as Jimmy Savile, Billie Eilish and Michael Jackson). Another TikTok explains high trust versus low trust faces. People with low-set brows, for instance, are deemed untrustworthy. 

Some of these ideas have factual roots – facial symmetry makes us perceive someone as more attractive, for example. But most are complete nonsense and it’s impossible to get away from the sinister origins of these particular sketchy ideas. “I cannot stress this enough: physiognomy, phrenology and craniometry are really bad, there’s nothing redeeming about them… they’re not fun, they’re not adorable, they are actually tools of harm. And marginalisation, oppression, genocide and systemic racism,” says Abby Cox, a fashion historian on YouTube. They’re ideas that are interconnected with white supremacy, colonisation and suppression of people, she says. The Nazis, for example, were big into physiognomy. Phrenology has strong links to racism and it was used to justify slavery and white supremacy. 

Present in many of these online trends is an obsession with evolutionary biology, harking back to when humans were hunter-gatherers. On X, one user posted about Anya Taylor-Joy and Halle Bailey having “herbivore eyes”, which “make them look easily predated upon”. Then there’s the canthal tilt: a ‘positive’ tilt is considered the optimum of attractiveness, or “hunter” eyes. Male incel culture, particularly, is prone to absorbing these aesthetic trends, sometimes going to extreme lengths to alter their looks (see: bonesmashing). Then there’s mewing – a tongue posturing technique which has no scientific evidence behind it. This year, looksmaxxing peaked (along with other forms of -maxxing, or self-optimisation, that are big in the manosphere).

The problem is that, as well as by lesser-known creators, these ideas are being parroted by people in power. Earlier this year, Elon Musk – who currently wields a worryingly large amount of influence over the US government – responded to a fringe account on X that promotes phrenology, claiming there’s a correlation between skull size and intelligence. The Onion, often on the money when it comes to the zeitgeist, published the satirical piece ‘Trump Releases Skull Measurements From Phrenology Exam’. “As someone who grew up in Germany, it’s questionable why TikTok is fascinated with a method Nazis used to segregate people,” reads one comment underneath a video by creator Noah Samsen, about the platform’s phrenology problem.

All this isn’t limited to facial structure: kibbe body types have gained traction online, which classifies people into six main body types: dramatic, natural, classic, gamine, theatrical romantic and romantic. While some might see these as harmless ways to help you dress, others find these notions of categorisation oppressive and a new way to feel bad about yourself (if you don’t have the one blessed body type, of course).

Why do these aesthetic pseudosciences hold so much allure? Perhaps it plays into the appetite to categorise ourselves, from horoscopes to Meyers Briggs tests, love languages and attachment styles we love to give ourselves labels. We are also increasingly occupied with trying to find methods and hacks to maximise our physical attractiveness. The internet has intensified glow-up culture – on Reddit, r/rateme and similar subreddits are huge, begging for other users to rate them or find out what they can do to improve their looks. Categorisations like “high visual weight” or “deer pretty” give the illusion of offering people the solution of how to ‘maximise’ their appearance and take the decisions out of their hands. Once you have identified that your face has a low visual contrast, there will be hundreds of videos telling you what kind of make-up is ‘best’ for you. 

But while this may seem harmless, or even helpful, it ultimately is only further intensifying the pressures we are feeling to fit certain beauty standards. We often talk about the damage done by beauty standards in the 90s and 00s – the era of lads’ mags and heroin chic (which, of course, is now back in vogue). But the young generation is now being bombarded with a new set of rigorous, mathematical – and phony – ideals to worry about. Is it any wonder, then, that we now have Sephora tweens and a normalisation of cosmetic surgery? And if any of this physiognomy-esque pseudoscience starts to creep into the government, via Musk or secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is known for his pseudoscientific beliefs, the dangers will be even more serious. So in 2025, let’s leave phrenology and physiognomy where they belong – in the past.