Do Beauty Ideals Shift with Socioeconomic Status?
Monday, November 10, 2025.
The dorm light flickers. A cracked phone leans against a coffee mug. She snaps another shot, widens her eyes, shrinks her chin, and waits for the algorithm to smile back.
A new study in Telematics and Informatics — by Yao Song, Qiyuan Zhou, Wenyi Li, and Yuqing Liu of Sichuan University and Hong Kong Polytechnic University — analyzed more than 13,000 pairs of edited selfies from Rednote, one of China’s most popular lifestyle apps.
The researchers wanted to quantify what beauty means when filtered through class.
They discovered that as regional income falls, faces grow softer. Eyes widen, noses shrink, jaws narrow, skin brightens. The lower the GDP, the younger the face looks.
We talk about beauty as personal expression, but Liu’s dataset reads more like economic confession.
The Economics of “Cute”
In evolutionary psychology, these proportions belong to the baby schema — large eyes, small nose, round cheeks — traits that trigger nurturing instincts.
On Rednote, these features have become a kind of digital diplomacy: faces edited into submission, optimized for warmth, trust, and compliance.
When Liu’s team cross-referenced selfie data with provincial GDP, they found that users from lower-income regions made far more dramatic edits.
“Cuteness,” it turns out, is not just an aesthetic preference but an economic survival strategy.
In places where mobility feels precarious, projecting sweetness may function as social capital — a way of being seen as safe, likable, trustworthy. In richer provinces, where status feels more secure, users could afford to look sharper, bolder, and more authentic.
One Weibo commenter put it bluntly: “The app teaches us to erase what makes us human.”
East Meets West (in the Filter)
Western digital beauty tells the same story in another dialect.
The Instagram face — all contoured cheekbones, raised brows, and plumped lips — performs dominance rather than deference. Research in the Journal of Aesthetic Science (Ramsey et al., 2022) finds that Western users equate angularity with an air of competence and authority.
A cross-cultural comparison by Jones et al. (2023) in Computers in Human Behavior showed that Chinese users idealized youth and softness, while American users emphasized sexual maturity and independence. Two aesthetics, one impulse: a diehard adaptation to the market’s gaze.
As psychologist Nancy Etcoff argued in The Survival of the Prettiest, beauty is “a biological, social, and economic negotiation conducted through the body.” Liu’s work just updates that negotiation for the selfie era, where the body now bargains through pixels.
Gender and the Digital Class System
Men aren’t exempt from the filter economy.
The global “male edit” trend produces leaner jawlines, darker brows, and colder eyes — less baby schema, more algorithmic alpha.
Masculine beauty now trades in restraint and precision. Different genders, same contract: Show me a face the market will reward.
The Psychology of Self-Editing
The findings echo familiar psychological terrain. Objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) explains how people internalize the observer’s gaze until self-surveillance feels like self-control.
Self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987) captures the quiet ache of living between “real” and “ideal” selves — a gap that technology now quantifies down to the pixel.
Add social capital theory (Bourdieu, 1986), and the logic crystallizes: attention is currency, and attractiveness is its fastest-moving asset. In low-income contexts, conformity buys belonging. In affluent ones, deviation becomes a designer privilege.
What this study shows, in its polite academic way, is that economic inequality doesn’t just shape opportunity — it also colonizes the face.
The Therapist’s View
In therapy, I see the same exhaustion behind those edited faces — the fear that the unfiltered self might not be enough to keep anyone’s attention.
Clients describe the fatigue of constant performance, the quiet panic of slipping out of aesthetic relevance. The filters are digital, but the anxiety is ancient.
Digital beauty, from this angle, is not vanity — it’s vigilance.
Cultural Echoes in the West
America mass-produces authenticity the way China mass-produces cute. Silicon Valley sells “realness” as a feature — the filtered face that looks unfiltered, the influencer who swears she’s “just being herself.” Madison Avenue once sold lipstick as liberation; Silicon Valley sells filters as self-expression. The dependency never changed, only the marketing.
The American aesthetic performs the same labor as its Chinese counterpart: it softens discontent into aspiration. What the Chinese call “kě ài” — adorable — we call relatable. Both are the illusion of intimacy packaged for profit.
Moral Shock: The Cost of Looking Safe
The softened face that wins followers also performs unpaid emotional labor — reassuring a culture that still prefers women who soothe rather than confront.
Each widened eye is an apology; each brightened cheek a promise not to disturb the peace.
Meanwhile, the Western “boss-browed” counterpart performs another kind of submission: dominance repackaged as desirability. The rules differ, but the obedience is mutual.
Beauty, east or west, is the price of safety.
A Historical Note
Every era remodels the face to fit its economy. The Victorians prized pallor because it proved you didn’t work.
Mid-century America idolized the suburban glow — radiance as proof of stability.
Under late-stage Limbic Capitalism, we worship self-optimization. The modern face is a performance review you wear.
Limitations and Future Directions
Liu’s team notes that Rednote users are mostly young women and that GDP is a fairly blunt proxy for personal wealth.
Still, the portrait is revealing.
Future research should track AI beauty filters, body editing apps, and cross-platform identity shifts — especially as deepfakes erase what’s left of “authenticity.”
FAQ
Is this about insecurity?
Not entirely. For many, editing isn’t self-hatred but survival — a form of digital diplomacy.
Why do poorer users edit more?
Because appearance can feel like the only variable left to control. Conformity becomes the most affordable kind of hope.
How does this connect to Western ideals?
In China, faces get softer to look safe; in the West, sharper to look strong. Both translate insecurity into marketable form.
Final Thoughts
America built its mythology on the open road; now we pave our selfhood across a feed. The new frontier is the face, and everyone’s homesteading in pixels.
The modern face isn’t born; it’s rendered.
And what we render reveals what we fear. In economies built on exposure, the only unforgivable flaw is invisibility.
Every smoothed edge is a wish for safety disguised as style — and somewhere, deep inside the edit history, the original face still waits, unseen.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Song, Y., Zhou, Q., Li, W., & Liu, Y. (2025). Achieving your best self: How socio-economic variation and cultural values shape digital beauty trends. Telematics and Informatics, 92, 102313. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2025.102313