Successful social media stars actually have facial structures that are systematically different from the rest of us.
PsyArXiv · March 18, 2026 · qthwv_v1
AI-generated illustration
The Takeaway
Analyzing creators across four different countries revealed they consistently show higher levels of facial symmetry and more pronounced 'sexual dimorphism' than the average person. This suggests our digital 'visual diet' is being heavily skewed toward a specific, non-representative facial archetype rather than a cross-section of humanity.
From the abstract
The Internet both substantially expands and potentially biases our “visual diet” concerning faces. Using an evolutionary psychology framework, we compared the facial characteristics of popular content creators on online social media with control faces from the same populations. We analysed facial configurations with landmark-based geometric morphometrics and Bayesian models, conducting the first such comparison on a large sample. Across all four samples (Colombia: N = 291, 153 creators; Czechia: