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September 14th, 2022 
Awake Goy 
If you’re anything like me, you spend a few hours a week doomscrolling on TikTok, picking up organizing tips, cleaning hacks, anxiety about assorted medical disorders, and new insecurities you never would’ve come up with on your own. I’ve diagnosed myself with three ailments from social media just today, as well as somehow ending up on #buttertok.
Anyway, back to discovering new things to hate about yourself due to technology. Personally, I love a little guidance when it comes to identifying flaws—and “fixing” them, if that means picking up bougie skincare products and ‘hot girl’-approved crushed pearl powder to put in my morning smoothies. But for more serious treatments—i.e. Botox, fillers, and cosmetic procedures—sometimes, you want to look before you leap. That was how I ended up curious about an app called Aesthete Genius, which is intended to tell you what nips and tucks you could make to your face in pursuit of personal perfection.
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I downloaded Aesthete Genius’ $4 app to tell me whether or not I was hot, and which parts of my face need to change in order for me to achieve peak hotness (bet you didn’t know you could get filler for your eye troughs). The program uses illustrative information technology—aka artificial intelligence—to give an (allegedly) accurate representation of what your face would look like after any combination of procedures. You can modify your face shape, cheeks, and lips to different degrees from the comfort of your own couch. The artificial intelligence technology is based on founder and CEO Sarah DeLaet’s 13 years of experience in the medical aesthetic industry as a nurse, trainer, sales rep, and consultant. The goal of the app, according to the Aesthete Genius site, is “allowing patients more control and creating transparency between practitioner and patient.”
Look, nippin’ and tuckin’ is nothing new to me—hello, I’m from LA. My mom recently sent me back to New York with a plane lunch kept cool by a post-Botox icepack, so you can say I’m pretty familiar with the world of cosmetic procedures; but I’ve never seriously considered it for myself. As a human that has crossed the threshold of age 30, most of my friends are already well-versed in Botox, and the occasional filler, so if you’re already on the face-jabbing train, I can imagine how Aesthete Genius could be a good tool for showing your plastic surgeon, or whoever injects your punim, exactly what you are looking for. (Side note: The ongoing saga of iconic 90s supermodel Linda Evangelista be a warning to you to never fuck with CoolSculpting, K?) Aesthete Genius allows you to take it one step further, with a special “photoshoot” option for members 18+ that will assess your images, and take you to an interactive map where you can access the nearest genius (a.ka. injector) in your area.
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The beauty (and pain) of this app is the feature that scans your individual face and gives automatic “suggestions” of how you could look better. Just like the Plastics in Mean Girls, Aesthete Genius informed me that “apparently there’s a lot of things that can be wrong on your body,” starting with the fact that apparently my chin is gigantic—which is not something I thought you could fix with injectables?
Unlike most filters on TikTok and Instagram, one thing the app does well is subtlety. Yes, you can get to Bratz-level features, but the “ tweaks” the app’s AI suggests doesn’t go overboard. I honestly had to check it against my unfiltered appearance to truly see the difference as to what exactly was being minimized or maximized.
The long and short of it is that the app is really fun to play with for about 15 minutes, and then you get over it, and realize that you could’ve just scrolled through every Snapchat filter for free, and found a (temporary) new nose that way. It’s basically a technologically advanced camera filter that you can adjust manually, and is subtly calibrated to give you “realistic”-looking results. Everything from the size of your lips to the depth of your under-eye sockets (which is the only thing I will be seeing when I look in the mirror for the foreseeable future) can be changed—but I’m just not sure that that’s a good thing. It’s one thing to want to fix a lifelong insecurity, and quite another to be actively seeking out new ones. But on the plus side, the results within the app are, technically, achievable.
So, if you’re curious about what you’d look like with Kylie Jenner-esque lips, or maybe the full Nicole Kidman, Aesthete Genius is one way to find out without a single syringe poking your face. Even if you never bite the bullet on any procedure, there’s nothing wrong with a little virtual experimentation. Although, [puts Post-It on your bathroom mirror] obviously you’re already a stunner, no matter what. Pain is beauty, but virtual beauty is only $3.99.
Aesthete Genius is available for iPhone and iPad.
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