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For the past two weeks, two words in the above tweet have at random moments surged to mind, shocking me out of productivity or reverie as though the horns of the apocalypse have begun to sound:

• “HOT” (in scare quotes)

• PLAIN-looking

Is that what “plain-looking” is? I wondered, pacing around my apartment in a haze, squinting at the middle distance with despair in my heart and fury in my blood. Is she not hot?

“Is this what ‘plain-looking’ is?” I replied to the tweet.

A chorus of ghouls burst forth to assure me:

“She’s extremely generic-looking. If I saw her about and about I don’t think I’d give her a second glance”

“There are 50 of her walking on a street always. There is so many girls who look like her. She’s not ugly but she’s not stand out.”

“There’s nothing special about her. I don’t know how I’d even describe her. Her hair is brown? She has … eyes?”

Now, reader, I’ve been over this: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and hotness is subjective on an individual level, but as I wrote, “we all know what society and culture at large consider most hot.” Or at least I thought we knew, because apparently there is a subset of people who look at a woman with flawless skin, a symmetrical face, big eyes, pouty lips, and thick hair, and say “Meh. I see girls like her walking down the street every day.”

No you don’t. You see girls like her, and girls who are even more striking and glamorous, in your phone every day and it’s rotting your brain.

I’ll grant these ostensible arbiters of aesthetics that if they go to a large college or live in cities where the entertainment and fashion industries have a significant presence, they probably do regularly encounter a lot of very pretty people. But I do not think that simply seeing pretty people frequently would downgrade them to “plain” status if their beholders were not additionally subject to an avalanche of supernaturally hot people on social media every day of their lives. They see too many pretty faces every day to be at all moved by just another one. Dazzle me, they think. I need more. It’s so easy to be hotter now than ever before, they think. You can get all the procedures. You should know how to snatch your face. Why aren’t you making me look twice? Why aren’t you standing out? Why don’t you look like an alien?

Alien-like might be what it takes to stand out in the era of beauty standard brain rot. We’re all supposed to be doing our skincare, makeup, tutorials, and procedures to look baseline “good” or pretty — when so much of our culture takes place in the digital, visual sphere, how could that feel like anything but a mandate to many of us? To surpass “generic,” a person has to look unusually, otherworldly, almost scarily beautiful.

Consider that the most beautiful girl in the world when I was a teenager was Britney Spears, who looked like this when she hit the scene:

By the Tate McRae calculus, that Britney would be considered “plain,” or the dreaded “mid.” I mean, how would you even describe her? Her hair is bronde? She has … eyes? As a 35-year-old woman I can’t be sure who the Gen Z beauty icons are, but gals like Dove Cameron and Madison Beer appear to be among them:

What’s the difference? They have Instagram face, and Britney didn’t. Similarly, Tate McRae has traditionally beautiful physical attributes but she doesn’t have the extremes of Instagram face: extreme absence of buccal fat, extreme button nose, extreme angular jaw line. People suffering from beauty standard brain rot perceive this lack of extremes as boring (“plain”) and probably out of touch (“Don’t you know that your face is supposed to be more exciting than this?”), and there is almost surely a class and wealth element at play (“Truly famous and rich people are supposed to have Instagram face, aren’t they? They’re supposed to look like the people from The Capitol, right?”).

“Plain” as it applies to women’s looks has historically meant something like “neither pretty nor ugly, usually leaning toward less pretty.” Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen describe as “plain” the female characters who are implied to be or obviously stated as unnoticeable or unattractive; Grace Poole in “Jane Eyre” is described as having a “hard, plain face.” A woman who looks like Tate McRae is not not pretty. I have a hard time believing that if you were in a real room with her, you wouldn’t notice her. But more and more, many of us are seldom in real rooms with anyone, so I guess we’ve lost perspective.

Of course, some of this is about me and what I look like. I wonder whether Tate McRae is considered “plain” because it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that she could be my hotter little sister. If she’s plain, I suppose I am Anjelica Huston in “The Witches” after she takes her fake face off. Alas. My analysis here has the same vibe as the posts I see every three days about how insane it was that Bridget Jones and the “chubby” lady (Natalie) from “Love Actually” were considered fat — yes, early aughts body culture was fucked, but behind these posts is the desire to litigate whether we would be considered fat, too, and we probably need to analyze that anxiety.

But if I’m being quite honest, I truly am less bothered about my own looks — I wrote about how I know I’m just “cute” and that’s OK, and I meant it — than I am about what this could mean for younger women now and in the future. One tweet and three people’s response do not suggest that most or even many of the people in this world think that regular-pretty girls aren’t pretty anymore. But things are changing. I often watch movies and shows from the 90s and early 2000s and think, “Jesus, people looked … normal.” They weren’t all angles and sucked cheeks and hard edges. I don’t know how else to describe it, they looked realer. Like you could reach out and touch them and feel the warmth of a messy little human instead of the cold contours of a person-like bust in a museum. The former is more beautiful to me at this point in my life, perhaps because I worry it’ll disappear.

Maybe we’ll tire of the extremes and something like “quiet beauty” will emerge as a trend like “quiet luxury” did. “The Normal-Girl Look” will become a thing on TikTok and people will be trying to evoke Julia Stiles’ no-makeup makeup in “10 Things I Hate About You.” I’m not saying that’s what we should want — it would still be another way we’re supposed to be besides whatever we are. We’d still be looking around at all the pretty people and wondering how to situate ourselves among them. It would probably be easier if we couldn’t see so many all the time.

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