Looksmaxxing chart: the PSL tiers from sub 5 to True Adam, explained

The looksmaxxing chart is the ladder of labels that rating forums attach to the PSL scale: sub 3, LTN, MTN, HTN, Chadlite, Chad and True Adam. It is searched under many names (PSL chart, looksmaxxing tier list, PSL tier list) and every version you find disagrees with the others at the edges. The reason is not that one of them is right. It is that two different scales are in circulation under the same names, and no tier was ever measured against anything.

This page puts the tiers on one chart, gives the numbers on both scales, explains what each label does and does not say, and is honest about the part most chart pages skip: how a tier actually gets assigned, why the same face gets a different one in the next thread, and where a measurement fits in. Nothing here ranks you. If you came because a number or a label is bothering you, the sections on what sub 5 means and when the chart stops being a hobby are written for that.

Top to bottom, with the range each name gets on the original 1–8 scale, the range the same name gets on one common out-of-10 version, the women's label where forums use a different one, and what this site's own scan does with the name. The out-of-10 column is not a conversion. The two scales were never calibrated against each other, which is the whole subject of the next section.

Two things to notice before reading the individual tiers. First, the labels on the right of the ladder are defined by their neighbours: Chadlite is "a diminutive of Chad", HTN is "the top of the normies", and a tier is only meaningful relative to the one above it. Second, the rungs are finest at the top. Four names (HTN, Chadlite, Chad, True Adam) are spread over the upper half of the scale, while the middle is split into only two or three. A ladder with fine rungs at the top is built to rank the few, and it describes the many badly.

The original PSL scale runs from 1 to 8. It took shape on three forums, which the PSL scale page covers, with 4 as the defined midpoint, 5 as the start of "high tier" and 8 as a ceiling anchored to a few celebrity photos. The tier names were coined on that scale, which is why an HTN is a 5 and a Chad is a 7.

The newer charts, mostly from short-video platforms and rating apps, keep the names and move them onto a 1–10 scale. The same Chadlite becomes a 7 and a Chad lands somewhere between 7.5 and 8.5. A number that means "a bit above average" on one scale means "clearly good-looking" on the other. People then compare their numbers across scales without noticing, and one side feels cheated.

This is also where "sub 5" gets two meanings. On the 1–8 scale it is below the high-tier line, so it covers the midpoint and everything under it. On an out-of-10 chart it is below average, so it covers a smaller region of what the chart calls normal. The dashed lines in the diagram above sit at 5 on both bars and cut through different tiers: the start of HTN on the top bar, the middle of MTN on the bottom one. When two people argue about whether a face is a 5 or a 6, check which scale each of them is using before checking anything else.

• ✓Original 1–8: 4 is the midpoint by definition; 5 and above counts as high tier; 8 is a ceiling that is not handed out.
• ✓Out-of-10 charts: names are moved up by one or two points; the midpoint is usually 5; Chad sits near 8.
• ✓Neither is calibrated: no rating panel was ever used to anchor either scale, so the two cannot be converted, only translated by custom.

"Sub 5" is the most searched phrase on this chart and the least informative. Literally, it is a cutoff: below 5. In forum usage it is shorthand for "not attractive by our scale". Both uses hide how the scale is built. On the original 1–8 scale, 4 is the midpoint by definition, which means the label "sub 5" is applied to the middle of the scale and everything below it. A scale built that way will call most faces sub 5. That says something about how the scale was constructed and nothing about the face being rated.

Is being sub 5 bad? Not in any measured sense. The label means a stranger placed one photo under the forums' high-tier line. It leaves out expression, grooming, voice, humour, style and how someone carries themselves, which a photo rating cannot include and which decide almost all real-world impressions. If the phrase is bothering you, that is what the slang was designed to do. It is not information about your face.

If you want a way to separate the claim from the person: a rating thread produced the number, not a measurement. Next time the same face goes into a different thread, in a different photo, the number moves. The following sections show why.

For each tier: what forums mean by it, what the label does not say, and how this site's scan relates to it. The scan relationship is deliberately one line each, because it is a different measurement from a forum rating and the mismatch is the point.

True Adam: the ceiling

PSL 8 on the original scale, 8.5 and above on out-of-10 charts. Also written True Eve for women, and in older threads "PSL god". It is the theoretical ceiling of the scale: a face the forums would change nothing about. It is attached to a handful of prime-era model and actor photos. Some newer charts add "Adamlite" at about 7.5 for faces just short of it.

What the label does not say: that anyone has been measured at it. By construction nobody is rated an 8. It is the anchor the scale hangs from. That is why "what comes after True Adam" has no answer: the words some people put above it (gigachad, terachad) are jokes or synonyms in the same 7.5–8 region, not higher bands. A chart that shows a tier above True Adam has invented one.

Chad: the top named tier

PSL 7–7.5, or about 7.5–8.5 on out-of-10 charts; Stacy for women. Forums describe near-complete harmony across the eye area, cheekbones, jaw, nose and skin at once, judged against model and celebrity photos, and treat it as rare enough to name individuals.

What it does not say: that the person is a population percentile or that it can be confirmed from a selfie. A forum Chad is often a professionally lit and styled photo of someone chosen because the photo reads that way. The label describes a photo and a rater's taste, not a face in a room.

Chadlite: one step under

PSL 6–6.5, or about 7–7.5 on out-of-10 charts; Stacylite for women. Clearly above the midpoint with strong bone structure, but with one or two features that keep the face out of the tier above: a softer jaw, a less deep-set eye area, a narrower face. The usual example given is a good-looking actor who is not a model.

The line between HTN, Chadlite and Chad is where rating threads argue most, because it comes down to taste in bone structure rather than anything countable. Two threads rating the same photo often land a full tier apart. If a post claims to "detect" Chadlite from a photo with a precise number, treat the precision as decoration.

HTN: the top of the middle

PSL 5–5.5, or about 6–7 on out-of-10 charts. The first tier above the "sub 5" line: a face forums call clearly good-looking in an ordinary photo, with harmony across most features but without the bone structure they reserve for the top tiers.

You may see the claim that HTN is "the top 15 to 25 percent" of people. No study sits behind it. The only honest statement about HTN is the circular one: it is what raters call a face that they like but would not call a Chadlite.

MTN and LTN: the middle, split in two

MTN is PSL 4–4.5; LTN is PSL 3–3.5 (about 4.5–6 and 3–4.5 on out-of-10 charts). Forums treat 4 as the average face and 4.5 as slightly above it. LTN is just under the midpoint: an ordinary face with a feature or two a rater would flag, such as a recessed chin or a heavy under-eye area. Both count as "sub 5" in forum use. These two are the tiers most people who ask for a rating are placed in, because a midpoint is where the middle of a distribution goes.

What the labels do not say: that the difference between an MTN and an LTN is visible to anyone who is not rating. Photo conditions move a rating this far by themselves. A phone held at arm's length makes the nose look larger than the same face photographed from further away; that is a geometric effect of camera distance, not a change in the face (Ward et al., 2018, a model of how a selfie changes apparent nose size).

Sub 3: a number, not a label

PSL 1–2.5, or 1–3 on out-of-10 charts. The forums' bottom band, for faces placed far from their photographic canon. The usual forum word for this band is a slur, which is why this chart uses the number. The practical source of most "sub 3" verdicts is a stranger rating a selfie with unknown lighting, lens distance and expression, not a feature of the person.

The canon the forums rate against is a narrow set of celebrity and model photos. Distance from that canon is not distance from being attractive or from being liked, which is a separate outcome with separate drivers. Nothing in the scan on this site assigns this band.

Women use the same 1–8 numbers with different names at the top: Stacylite for the Chadlite band at 6–6.5, Stacy for the Chad band at 7–7.5 and True Eve for the ceiling at 8. The LTN, MTN and HTN names are shared. The forums' other labels for women are insults, so this chart does not list them.

Forums also weight different features when rating women, with more attention to softness, skin and apparent youth than to jaw and brow. Those are choices of the communities doing the rating, not properties of faces. The scan on this site does not ask for or detect sex and applies the same geometry to every face.

A rating thread looks at bone structure first: the eye area and brow ridge, cheekbones, jaw and chin, then the nose, skin and how masculine or feminine the face reads. Harmony across all of them is what is supposed to separate HTN from Chadlite from Chad. Hair, style, body and expression are meant to be set aside, which is the difference between a PSL rating and how attractive someone is in a room.

Three things move the verdict on the same face regardless of the face:

1. 1The photo. In a set of experiments, different photos of the same person produced different impressions, with the variation within one person's photos comparable to or larger than the variation between different people, across several social judgments (Todorov & Porter, 2014). That result is about trait impressions rather than PSL, but a tier is a first impression applied to one image, and it inherits the instability.
2. 2The lens. At arm's length a phone camera exaggerates what is closest to the lens. A model of selfie distortion describes how apparent nose size changes with camera distance (Ward et al., 2018), so the same face photographed from further away has different proportions in the picture.
3. 3The rater. Taste in bone structure is the only thing separating Chadlite from Chad in forum definitions, and taste varies. There is no calibration panel; the scale has no published measurement procedure or validation study.

None of this means attractiveness is arbitrary. A large meta-analysis found that raters agree reasonably well about who is and is not attractive, both within and across cultures (Langlois et al., 2000). What the evidence does not support is the idea that a forum can read a precise half-point tier off one selfie. Broad agreement on the large differences does not extend to the small ones that separate adjacent tiers.

Nobody knows. No representative sample of faces has ever been rated on the PSL scale. The figure that circulates, that about 92.7 percent of people are normies, comes from a meme distribution chart, not a study, and the "top 1 percent" and "top 0.1 percent" labels attached to Chad and True Adam are lore repeated from thread to thread. The only fixed points on the scale are definitional: 4 is the midpoint because the scale says so, and 8 is a ceiling nobody is given.

What can be measured is narrower. This site's scan combines symmetry and three facial ratios into one number and ranks it against the 102 faces of one published research set. Those percentiles are real, and the bands on the PSL scale page come from them: HTN is 7.3 – 8.65 (70th–85th percentile), Chadlite is 8.65 – 9.37 (85th–93rd percentile), Chad is 9.37 – 9.8 (93rd–98th percentile). They are a ranking against 102 faces under neutral studio conditions, not a population share and not a conversion of the forum numbers.

The same 102 faces were also rated for attractiveness by 2,513 people. When this site's score was compared with those human ratings, the two were unrelated (Spearman ρ = −0.07). That is a straightforward finding about what a ratio index does and does not capture, and it is the reason this site does not present its bands as a prediction of how anyone will be rated. A measured tier says how four proportions rank in one photo. A voted tier says what a group of people liked about a photo. A forum Chadlite and a measured "Chadlite" share a name and little else.

That is also why the forum tiers cannot be reproduced by a calculator, whatever the calculator claims. To place a face in Chad, a tool would have to model a particular community's taste, and the community does not agree with itself at that level of precision. Anything that prints "Chad" or "True Adam" with a decimal is guessing and dressing the guess as a result.

Partly, and only in the measured sense above. The PSL scale test maps the face with 478 landmarks in the browser, scores symmetry and ratios, and reports a percentile band against the reference set. It does not return "sub 3" or a precise forum number, because a photo does not support a verdict that specific. Used as a private baseline under matched photo conditions (same distance, same lighting, neutral expression, camera at eye level), it can show whether a change in how you photograph moved a reading. It cannot rank you against people, and it was never meant to.

• ✓Use it for: comparing your own photos taken the same way, and seeing which ratios, such as thirds or fifths, drive the number.
• ✓Do not use it for: deciding whether you are "sub 5", comparing yourself with a stranger's score from another tool, or choosing a procedure.
• ✓Better first step if you want a read on how you look: the attractiveness test explains what each ratio measures, and the face shape detector gives you something you can actually style around.

A tier list is a game right up to the moment it becomes a mirror. Researchers who have looked at the looksmaxxing trend describe a wide range of practices, from skin care and grooming to bone-breaking and self-injected fillers, and a paediatric review flagged it as an emerging concern for young people in particular (Grillo et al., 2026; Mekhail et al., 2026).

Body dysmorphic disorder is a preoccupation with perceived flaws that other people do not notice or see as minor. A systematic review estimated it affects about 1.9% of adults and 2.2% of adolescents in the community, and far more people in cosmetic settings (Veale et al., 2016). Rating yourself and others constantly is a pattern worth taking seriously. Signs the chart has stopped being a curiosity:

• ✓Checking mirrors, photos or scores for hours a day, or avoiding them completely.
• ✓Rating yourself or other people constantly, or seeking out forums that rate faces.
• ✓Skipping school, work or plans because of a number or a label.
• ✓Planning procedures to fix something people close to you cannot see.
• ✓Trying risky practices after being told they cause harm.

Treat it as a vocabulary, not a verdict. If you came to decode a thread or a video, the tables above are the translation. If you came wondering where you stand, the fair answer is that a tier does not exist for you until a large, calibrated panel rates a good photo of you, and none does. What you can do something about is cheap and unglamorous, and it is covered elsewhere on this site:

• ✓How to looksmax: what works, what does nothing and what causes harm, ranked by risk.
• ✓How to be prettier: the perception mechanisms (contrast, fatigue cues, grooming) that account for most of the difference people notice.
• ✓Looksmax AI apps compared: what the rating apps actually do and what they cost.