Gen Z sees beauty differently. Just look at their go-to pose.
There’s a new selfie face on the internet — and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Hot people once tried to look hot. Now, they’re trying to look bored and unbothered. At least that’s what their new pout signals.
Whether you’re Gen Z yourself (or a good peace-sign throwing, kissy-facing Zillennial like me), you might’ve noticed young people on your feeds contorting their faces in a new way. And while it vaguely resembles what we’d call RBF (need I spell that out?), it’s actually very intentional.
Why should you care? Well, The Washington Post did… But more importantly, knowing about it might help you look cool in someone’s selfie this weekend — or at least sound smart talking about how beauty trends (even the seemingly silly ones) are impacted by technology and the social media platforms each generation grows up on.
Here’s your baby friday briefing:
[Photo illustration: Julia Meslener/Yahoo News; photos: Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images, Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images, TheStewartofNY/WireImage via Getty Images]
Scroll TikTok long enough and you’ll start to notice it: a subtle but unmistakable expression showing up in selfies and videos. The upper lip lifts slightly while the lower lip tucks upward, creating a look somewhere between a pout and a faint frown. Online, it’s been dubbed the “Gen Z pout” and users say it’s quickly becoming the latest go-to selfie face.
Like the duck lips that dominated Instagram in the early 2010s or the dramatic angles of MySpace-era selfies before that, the expression is becoming shorthand for a generational aesthetic shaped by social media trends and evolving beauty standards. As the look spread across social media — boosted by influencers like Ashtin Earle, TV personalities like Love Island fave Iris Kendall and even red carpet appearances from celebrities like Lily-Rose Depp and Ariana Greenblatt — experts say the viral visage isn’t just another fleeting TikTok trend. It’s a lens into how a generation of digital natives navigates beauty in an era shaped simultaneously by cosmetic procedures, social media aesthetics and the technologies used to capture and edit our faces.
Less about volume, more about balance
Take one look at Kim Kardashian’s 2015 selfie book Selfish to see the lips that defined a generation. The era’s signature look was a protruding pout that emphasized dramatic fullness. The aesthetic was cemented when Kardashian’s sister Kylie Jenner revealed she used lip fillers to achieve her own plumped look — a revelation that helped fuel a surge in cosmetic lip procedures and propelled the launch of her beauty brand, Kylie Cosmetics.
A decade later, a different kind of pout is taking over online. The “Gen Z pout” is gaining popularity through online influencers and celebrities in much the same way, though it reflects a different aesthetic philosophy.
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“When we hear the term Gen Z pout, it’s really focusing more on refinement rather than just volume,” Dr. Bob Basu, a Texas-based plastic surgeon and president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), tells Yahoo. “It’s about enhancing the lips while keeping them balanced and very natural looking.”
Rather than exaggerated fullness, Basu says the current look emphasizes subtle changes in shape, with softer lip definition and a slightly lifted upper lip. “It’s really about shape, balance and proportionality,” he says. “It’s very different from what we saw years ago, where the trend was larger volume, more forward projection, more overfilled.”
The approach reflects a broader aesthetic shift in cosmetic procedures, where dramatic transformations are giving way to more restrained enhancements like the nonsurgical lip flip. The treatment has been trending for several years, and TikTok creator Shannon Zhao credited lip flips as one possible driver of the Gen Z pout back in 2024. “I feel like a lot of people in my generation either have lip flips or they try to do that face in photos,” said Zhao in a TikTok video. In another, she provides a quick tutorial.
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That ambiguity — whether someone’s lips look that way because of a cosmetic procedure or a practiced expression — is part of the appeal, reflecting a social media culture where the line between natural and enhanced is often blurred. The trend also reflects a larger pattern that each generation tends to develop its own “photo face,” shaped by the technology and beauty standards of the moment.
Let me guess…you’re now dying to know how technology shapes the selfie faces of each generation. READ THE FULL PIECE HERE ◡̈
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