Looksmax AI: how the rating apps work, what they cost, and what the score can't tell you

"Looksmax AI" is not one app. It is the name for a category of phone apps that take a selfie and return a score out of 10, feature ratings and improvement tips — the best known being Umax and LooksMax AI, which are made by different companies. None of them publishes exactly how its score is calculated.

Search for looksmax AI and you will find several different products using the same few words. That matters more than it sounds: advice, prices and privacy terms for one "Umax" do not apply to another. These are the apps you are most likely to meet:

Apps in this category do not explain their scoring in detail, but there are only two basic ways to turn a photo into a number, and most products use one or a mix of both.

Landmark geometry: the arithmetic part

A face-landmark model places points on the photo — the corners of the eyes, the edges of the nose and mouth, the outline of the jaw — and the app calculates distances, angles and ratios from them: symmetry, facial thirds, eye spacing, canthal tilt, jaw width. This part is ordinary arithmetic and it is repeatable: the same photo gives the same measurements. Our own attractiveness test is built this way: 478 landmarks, symmetry weighted at 40% and three proportion ratios at 20% each, computed in your browser. The weights are a choice, and saying so is the honest part.

Learned ratings: a model's opinion of your face

The other approach trains a model on faces that people have already rated, so it learns to predict the rating a face would get. Areum, for example, describes a model "trained on millions of real human comparisons" and a calibration step where you choose between AI-generated faces. A learned score captures whatever the training ratings rewarded — which may include lighting, grooming, expression and the demographics of the raters — and it cannot tell you which of those it is responding to.

Where the photo goes

Most of these apps analyse your photo on their servers, which means it leaves your phone. That is not unusual for an app, but it matters for a face: Umax's privacy policy lists biometric data among the sensitive information it processes, and LooksMax AI's says face data is kept for 30 days and then deleted. The tools on this site run the landmark model in your browser instead, so the photo never leaves your device — a design choice with trade-offs, but it removes the need to trust a retention policy.

"Umax – Become Hot" is published by Improvement Tech LLC, a company registered in Pennsylvania. Its App Store description calls it "the looksmax AI tool", and the flow is simple: take a selfie, get an analysis, follow improvement tips. On Google Play it showed more than ten million downloads and a store listing last updated in April 2024. On the App Store it is rated 18+.

Is Umax free to use?

The download is free. Umax's terms describe a three-day free trial for new users, with the account charged for the chosen subscription when the trial ends. The in-app purchases listed on the US App Store were weekly premium at $3.99, $4.99, $6.99 and $9.99, monthly premium at $9.99, $12.99 and $24.99, a $3.99 "Supercharge" and a $6.99 item called "You as a 10/10". Several prices appear under the same plan name, so the price offered to you may differ.

How much Umax costs over a year

How to cancel a Umax subscription

Subscriptions bought through the App Store or Google Play are cancelled in the store, not by deleting the app: on iPhone, Settings → your name → Subscriptions; on Android, Play Store → profile → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions. Umax's terms say cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid term and that all purchases are non-refundable, so cancel before a trial ends if you do not want to be charged.

LooksMax AI is a separate app from Mnkybrain Labs, Inc., rated 13+ on the App Store. You upload photos, it analyses your traits and returns a rating and personalised advice. Its US in-app purchases on 14 September 2026 included LooksMax Pro at $3.99, a weekly plan at $3.99, a $4.99 Hairstyles Pack, packs of "boosts" from $2.99 to $5.99 and a $0.99 "Chad Pack". Its privacy policy says it collects the photos you upload plus age, gender and location, keeps face data for 30 days before automatic deletion, and does not share face data with third parties unless required by law.

Umax AI: Face Scan & PSL Rating is a different app from a different developer that shares the Umax name; it offers a face scan with a "PSL score" and plans from $4.99 a week to $34.99 a year. Several other apps on both stores use "Umax" or "Looksmax" in their titles. If you are reading reviews or advice, check the developer name to be sure it is the app you actually have.

Areum: a 3D scan and a learned rating

Areum, from Bounty Studio, Inc., works differently: a guided 3D face scan with the phone camera, and a report from a model the developer says was trained on millions of human comparisons. It says your scan is never used to train its model. Its in-app purchases ranged from $4.99 to $99.99 on the US App Store, and its privacy label listed photos and sensitive information among the data collected.

The measurements are real, and fragile

Landmark measurements from a photo are real, but they depend on the photo. A few degrees of head turn changes every horizontal distance; a phone held close widens the middle of the face; light from one side shifts where a model places the edge of a feature. Two selfies taken a minute apart can produce noticeably different numbers. That is why a score is most useful as a consistent index of the same setup over time, not as a verdict on a face.

The score is a weighting somebody chose

Even with identical measurements, turning them into one number means deciding what counts and how much. One app might weight symmetry heavily; another might reward a particular jaw ratio or canthal tilt; a learned model weights whatever its training ratings rewarded. None of the looksmax AI apps above publishes that weighting, so there is no way to check it — and no reason two apps should agree. Research on facial attractiveness supports modest effects of averageness, symmetry and sexual dimorphism, not a single formula; and the popular golden-ratio "mask" was criticised for resting on fashion models rather than measured populations.

Is a 6.5 out of 10 attractive?

A score out of 10 only means something inside the app that produced it. Different apps use different scales and weightings, and subscriptions are sold on the promise of raising the number. A 6.5 in one app is not comparable to a 6.5 in another, or to a rating from a person.

Can ChatGPT rate attractiveness?

A general chatbot can describe a photo and will give a number if pushed, but it is not measuring anything: it has no calibrated scale, it does not compute facial geometry, and the same photo can get a different answer on a different day or with a different prompt. If you want measurements, use a tool that computes them; if you want an opinion, a chatbot's is no more authoritative than a stranger's.

Age is the part worth underlining. Looksmaxxing content reaches teenagers, and a 2026 paper in Pediatrics described it as an emerging concern for children's health; another 2026 analysis in a maxillofacial surgery journal catalogued dangerous practices spreading through the same communities. A rating app is not the same as those practices, but a number out of 10 attached to a young person's face is a poor starting point. If you are under 18, the measurement tools on this site are not meant for you either.

• ✓Anything in profile. The true gonial angle, chin projection and the line from under the chin to the neck need a side view; a selfie has no depth axis.
• ✓Bone versus soft tissue. A defined jaw from bone and one from low body fat look the same from the front.
• ✓Skin. Evenness of skin tone changes how faces are rated in studies, and geometry does not see it.
• ✓Expression and presence. Smiling changes how attractive a face is rated; a neutral selfie score ignores it.
• ✓How other people see you. Faces are judged as wholes, in motion and in context, not as a list of ratios.

The PSL scale that many of these apps borrow comes from forum culture rather than research, and a rating on it is a ranking system, not a measurement. The PSL scale page explains where it comes from and why this site treats it with caution.

If what you want is to look better rather than to score higher, the evidence points to changes a score barely registers — sleep, skin, grooming, hair and expression. How to be prettier and how to glow up go through what those studies measured.