“Do you think about me?”

So asks a disembodied voice at the beginning of a TikTok from user @velvet.mind. The question is followed by hypnotic synth pulses, hissing static, and sped-up, garbled human speech. An accompanying visual: a montage of immaculately made-up and stylish women who could all be models—indeed, some of them probably are. The text overlaid on the video reads “extreme beauty subliminal.”

The minute-long clip has nearly 300,000 likes and 1.4 million views. Why all this engagement for a bit of vaporwave ephemera? Because an online community of young women sincerely believe that sustained exposure to these sounds and images will improve their physical appearance.

According to the creator, the indecipherable words are a series of affirmations that include “My face is naturally symmetrical, balanced, and breathtaking” and “I have flawless, poreless, glowing skin.” Listeners are meant to subconsciously internalize and manifest such ideals; they echo that language in their replies, speaking their beauty goals into existence. “I am drop-dead gorgeous,” one comment reads.

Welcome to the world of “subliminals,” a subculture of feminine self-optimization that rests on the power of suggestion and hypnosis. Whereas recent media coverage has scrutinized young men’s extreme “looksmaxxing” strategies for enhancing their features, which arose from toxically misogynist web forums of the mid-2010s, the subliminals genre is perhaps even older (one subreddit dates back to 2012), albeit with far less mainstream recognition.

The diversity of these audiovisual artifacts shows their branching evolution over time. Some take the form of music snippets. Others are ASMR monologues or ambient soundscapes that make use of white noise effects like the patter of falling rain. Some feature footage of attractive celebrities—see this video that purports to make the viewer more closely resemble the actress Megan Fox—while others rely on trippy abstract shapes and colors.

Though there are “subs” for every imaginable makeover (fuller lips, curvier hips, silkier hair, smaller nose, bigger breasts, longer legs, even eyes of a different shape or color), the practice extends to all aspects of well-being. The right subliminal can supposedly help you ace an exam, achieve financial success, or make your crush fall head over heels for you. No matter what you want to change about your circumstances, there’s a subliminal for it.

Still, appearance-focused videos are far and away the biggest category, and as the recent proliferation of subliminals using terms including “looksmaxxing,” “facemaxxing,” and “beautymaxxing” make clear, they have links to the anxieties over perceived physical flaws that continue to drive young men into radicalizing online communities. Male looksmaxxers have occasionally voiced curiosity about and debated the techniques involved. Last week, a Redditor on r/subliminal asked if anyone could point him to a “male enhancement” subliminal that would potentially double his penis size.

Young women, of course, have always been under enormous pressure to meet unrealistic body standards. Apparently the internet has pushed a large contingent of them toward this quasi-spiritual solution rather than the brutal gym routines, hormone therapies, and radical surgeries favored by disillusioned young men.

Kyla, 20, tells WIRED that at a very young age, she was unhappy in life but then discovered “self-love” subliminals, which are intended to shift the listener’s image of themselves. (She requested that her last name be withheld out of concern for her professional standing.) “Once I realized I was viewing myself more positively and feeling happier with who I am, I tried some other subliminals for weight loss and desired features,” Kyla says, acknowledging how “insane” it sounds to claim that they produced results. “I lost 70 pounds and reached a healthy weight when I was previously overweight, without changing my lifestyle drastically,” she says. Kyla went on to make her own subliminals to help her work through other issues and find a relationship. She has since met both goals.

For Kyla, subliminals are the background texture to everyday activities, the same way a person might put on a favorite album or podcast while doing chores or commuting to work. “Since subliminals are intended to target our subconscious, I find it best to forget they’re playing and do something else in the meantime,” she says. “Preferred times would be after waking up and before sleeping. I find my body’s in a limbo state between awake and asleep, and I absorb the affirmations better.”

As one might expect, overwhelming faith in these methods for self-actualization lends popular creators the opportunity to monetize their work by taking personal commissions that run anywhere from a couple of bucks to upward of $50. Reviews of these services vary widely—for every rave review from a satisfied customer, there is a public warning about a creator who allegedly scams, ghosts, or otherwise betrays their clients. There are micro-dramas, too, around subliminals influencers accused of including unsafe, negative, or harmful material in their affirmations, whether maliciously or not. Those fed up with the difficulties of finding a reliable guide in this space may turn to subliminals-editing apps like VibeSesh to strike out on their own.

“At first, I was mainly drawn to body-related subliminals, which is what got me really interested in the whole concept,” says Nana, 23, who quickly got started creating videos herself. (She also requested we withhold her last name for professional reasons.) On her YouTube channel, which now has more than 150,000 subscribers, Nana shares content designed to help listeners achieve the “mindset” of Olympic gold medal figure skater Alysa Liu and a “glow-up/rebranding” for 2026. Like Kyla, she plays subliminals for herself while doing household tasks. “I also like to play them overnight while I sleep,” she says, because it gives her “instant results.” (It’s common for subliminals creators to recommend looping their content overnight.)

“For me, subliminals are basically just positive affirmations layered under sound, nothing more than that,” Nana says. Although she was initially drawn in by the prospect of physical transformation, she has come to regard it as a means of reframing such desires. Nana cites the “Law of Assumption,” popularized by the self-help writer and mystic Neville Goddard: “The idea that you already have what you’re manifesting,” as she puts it.

“So I see subliminals as more of a tool in that process, like a boost rather than something magical on its own,” Nana says. “That said, they’ve genuinely had a big impact on me. They completely reshaped the way I think about myself, especially my confidence and how I approach life in general.”

Certain creators take a more scientific view of subliminals. Kimberly Adante, 39, says she was first intrigued by “the intersection of neuroscience, neuroplasticity, and digital audio tools.” She adds that subliminals “aren’t magic” but “a practical way to deliver targeted suggestions below conscious awareness.”

In addition to using subliminals for everything from “financial manifestation” to “facial structure refinement,” she makes her own. She pairs her affirmations with “carefully chosen theta frequencies and immersive sound design.” (Theta frequencies, between 4 to 8 Hz, fall below the threshold of human hearing, which spans from 20 to 20,000 Hz.)

Sanjana Aina Sanghi, 21, whose YouTube channel offers subliminals for “perfect teeth + beautiful smile” and “slim defined face + sharp jawline,” also sees a neuroscientific basis for this content.

“Subliminals work basically by tricking the subconscious brain, in my opinion,” she says, mentioning the effectiveness of affirmations played at frequencies of “around 17,500 Hz,” toward the upper limit of hearing, “so that you cannot consciously reject what the subliminal is trying to implement.” Sanghi adds that there is research showing how repetition “rewires the brain,” which could account for the effects that listeners attribute to the affirmations in subliminals. “Over time, they turn into beliefs, and those beliefs influence how your life plays out,” she says.

Kristian Sandberg, who is an associate professor of neuroscience and leads an international research group at the Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience at Aarhus University in Denmark, has published work on subliminal perception. He says (via email) that this ecosystem of YouTube and TikTok clips fit a historical trend. “The phenomenon itself appears to be a new variant of something that has been proposed multiple times over the last century,” he says. A century ago, Sandberg notes, “auto-suggestion (repeating affirmations to oneself) was popular, and in the 1970s to 1990s it was tapes with motivational messages.”

Sandberg points out that while they’re called “subliminals,” the videos “appear to have a mix of subliminal and supraliminal stimuli”—that is, they contain audio and visual elements the user is consciously aware of. “In scientific studies, supraliminal effects are typically larger and more stable than subliminal effects,” he says. In order for subliminal messages to be effective, Sandberg says, they have to be properly configured within an audio track or a video, as they work within a relatively narrow perceptual window. “From a scientific perspective, I doubt that the subliminal messages in ‘subliminals’ have much impact on behavior, personality, and appearance.”

“On the other hand, if some people find them helpful, then the mechanism does not matter too much,” Sandberg says. “The messages appear relatively harmless as long as they do not become a replacement for interpersonal communication, action or training, or therapy or medical care.”

Sure enough, there is no shortage of positive testimonials on subliminals pages from those who claim transformative experiences.

“I listened to this twice, and I got an acceptance to my dream scholarship,” wrote a commenter on a YouTube subliminal titled “Everything Is Always Working Out for You.” The relevant subreddits are filled with posts documenting “proof” and “results,” usually with before-and-after pictures in the case of beauty subliminals.

And while it’s hardly unusual to run across someone describing the potential dangers of subliminals, it’s almost always couched in overall positivity. TikToker @dreamsofdestiny, for example, pinned a video in which she warned that subliminals can be so taxing on the mind as to cause dehydration and headaches, and insisted that her followers carefully research any unknown creator before using their content. She then clarified: “I’m in no way bashing YouTube subliminals. That is where I started. They literally changed my life.”

Once you’re convinced of that, it’s surely hard to see things any other way.