Influencer Culture’s Impact on College Students

Introduction

Social media influencers are one of the most powerful groups in the lives of college students today. They structure how they think about beauty standards and lifestyle, fitness, politics, and travel. While at their core, they help promote content that inspires students, they also produce content that lowers confidence and creates unnecessary pressure with spending habits and self-image. This article explores the impact of today's influencer culture on college students, highlighting key areas and potential risks.   

Beauty & Lifestyle

Sofi

Beauty and lifestyle influencers have become very well-known figures for college students. Influencers are content creators who share parts of their daily lives online with videos like skin care routines and reviewing makeup products, with the intention of influencing their audience to buy the products they are using. The main social media platforms for beauty and lifestyle influencers are TikTok and Instagram, and YouTube is the primary platform for longer content. Creators usually show very structured and curated daily routines that many people find appealing. College students make up a large share of an influencer's fans because this age group is still trying to establish routines, understand themselves, and, for the first time in their lives, buy things independently.

These posts help shape what many people see as the “standard” for beauty and body image. Most influencers post videos about skincare, makeup, and exercise. These kinds of videos can shape people’s ideas of what is “perfect” or “normal.” While many viewers find them enjoyable to watch, others might feel worse about themselves because they start to compare their own lives to people who seem effortlessly flawless and constantly productive. College students are already dealing with academic stress and social pressure, so they can start to feel behind or even less confident when they see glorified routines. 

College students are also heavily swayed by what creators promote and buy themselves. The process is simple. An influencer links a product, and with one click, people can buy that product from their landing page, all from one spot. An influencer's main source of income is paid partnerships, where you use a custom code, and when something is purchased, the influencer gets a kickback from the commission. This makes it really hard to tell the difference between true opinions and marketing. As a result, students end up buying brand-new clothes or supplements just to recreate what they’ve seen online, and chances are, what they've now purchased isn't a great product. For people living paycheck to paycheck, that pressure can get real, fast, as if spending money is how you “keep up.” 

Beauty and lifestyle Influencers also shape how students think their daily lives should be structured. The lifestyle trends that focus on an early start to the day, an exercise schedule, or a productivity-based routine tend to reinforce the idea that success comes from being extremely organized and aesthetically pleasing. These videos on “perfect days” can motivate viewers to adopt better practices, but they can also create impossible-to-meet expectations, since not all students have the luxury of pursuing this path due to work and class commitments. Although some people get inspired by others' success, others may be discouraged when they fail to reach that level of organization.

Mental health is arguably the part of beauty and lifestyle influencing that affects college students the most. Antonpoulou (2025) explains that products like skincare and makeup are easily going viral and becoming must-haves due to the “fomo” influencers instill in us. However, she also makes it clear that there is excessive oversaturation and that people no longer believe influencers. It is clear from this article that most people do not believe influencers use the products they promote. Trust levels have been declining over the years, and people have been purchasing only a few products promoted by influencers. As a result, viewers lose interest very quickly because that faith is gone. In addition, by the nature of their job, influencers travel a lot on brand trips, or just reaping the benefits of their job. This style of content is not realistic, and can unintentionally make people feel behind and start to compare themselves. When college students start posting videos, other students might feel they are not as put-together. After constantly watching content like this, lower self-esteem can start to form, especially if someone feels like they aren’t measuring up to other people their age. 

Although this has focused mostly on the negatives of social media’s lifestyle and beauty influencers, there are positives. Because their job focuses on beauty, many creators post self-care tips like exercises they found effective and different ways to DIY salon-style procedures. This kind of content pushes students to take better care of themselves, or at the very least, try something new. Most creators focus on body positivity and are easily relatable because they have felt the same way viewers have felt at some point in their lives. Being able to share those stories and connect on social media is something that is not talked about enough. Some influencers make videos about study tips and ways they got through college so that their audience can learn something useful from their videos, if makeup tips aren’t their thing. Because of this mix of topics, college students are able to find "comfort creators."

Beauty and lifestyle influencers are not going to disappear. In fact, Slate Teams (2026) claims this influencer culture is now a key piece of how people are introduced to most products. Their impact on college students will only continue to grow, as people start to get the courage to post things themselves and pursue careers in content creation. A few ways people are able to control the influence these creators have on them are by setting screen time limits, following people whose lifestyle seems more realistic, and following people who represent all different kinds of body types and skin colors. Even making small changes like going through platforms and removing the influencers who don’t fit your lifestyle can help improve self-confidence. With this awareness in mind, college students can cut some of the negative effects while still being active and up to date on social media.

Political

Eva 

As social media continues to rapidly develop, the ways in which it has been utilized to effect societal change have simultaneously evolved alongside it. Falling within the broader popularization and glorification of individuals considered to be social media influencers, political influencers additionally possess a unique type of power in digital spaces. Political influencers, in this context, engage in the production of content that engage in ideologies pertaining to government structure and party--such as "left" and "right" or "liberal" and "conservative"--as well as moral and societal ideals of what is considered "right" and "wrong". It is difficult to give a singular and wholly cohesive definition of what a political influencer is because of this spectrum of political beliefs and the greatly diverse set of backgrounds which popular political influencers have emerged from. Some would describe political social media influencers as journalists who digitally publish their reporting, or politicians who gain a large social media presence while campaigning for office while others consider non-institutional individuals--who built their following purely from social media--as political influencers (Riedl 2023). Along with the variety of ideologies and backgrounds, political influencers produce various different types of content to reach their target audience. Examples of content include short-form videos posted onto platforms such as TikTok or Instagram, live video streaming on Twitch or YouTube Live and audio-only podcasts.

Despite the inherently undefinable nature of political influencers, they all share one common feature: a goal to sell a political ideology or social cause, contrary to other types of influencers who aim to sell products through their content. Furthermore, political influencers are distinct from other types of influencers in the way they are afforded higher degree of protections on their content because of the political nature of their content and speech which is protected under the First Amendment's freedom of expression. While the scope of engagement with political social media influencers is not contained to any specific generation, they have receive more interaction from young, college-aged students. 

Conversely, however, they also can be used to propagate divisive ideologies. Two prominent examples of influencers who are involved in direct engagement with politicians are Riley Gaines and Hasan Piker.

Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer, centers her platforms on "protecting women's sports"--advocating against the participation of transgender individuals in sports. Since becoming a leading Conservative influencer, she has appeared in the campaign advertisements of Republican senators Rand Paul and Herschel Walker, spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention and has influenced the creation of federal legislation aimed at punishing public schools and universities who allow transgender men to participate in women's sports. Conversely, on the opposite end of the political spectrum, Piker is one of the most viewed left-wing live streamers. He has collaborated with House of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Although they operate in two vastly different political online spaces, Gaines, Piker and the broader network of political influencers demonstrate their modern role in shaping political debate, consciousness and identity. In the digital media economy, political influencers are incentivized to produce provocative and divisive content because of its tendency to generate the most engagement from platform's personalized algorithms. Such an environment often causes influencers seeking more engagement to rely on a "us v.s. them" narrative which, in effect, has the potential to perpetuate race, gender and class stereotypes in order to define oneself in relation to their opposition. 

Traditional gender inequalities, for example, often are reproduced even in digital political spaces explicitly against sexism (typically, left or liberal spaces). In order to navigate sexism from online audiences, female influencers often adopt intentional personas--such as the "witty diva," "nice mother" or the "tough girl" (Vochocová 2024). For college students consuming such content, this means that their construction of society's power dynamics is being placed in a context in which identity is constructed in order to be performed as a response to inequalities faced.

The influence political influencers have is then exaggerated by the existence of "filter bubbles" which further cement partisanship and digitally reproduce existing divides. Filter bubbles, or a social media user's personalized feed created by platform's algorithms that predict what content a user wants to see, effectively shield people from opposing viewpoints, only exposes them to content they've previously enjoyed and, moreover, where friction is created in a digital community, it tends to transfer to an in-person community.

The combination of weaponized emotional content and filter bubbles has been seen to have negative effects on college students mental health. Understanding this issue through the lenses of socialization theory allows for the understanding of how students internalize the social hierarchies and moral absolutes they see being reproduced digitally through political influences. Material impacts consumption of political content has on college students include heightened anxiety, anger and fear (Alsharawy 2026).

Extreme Male Beauty

Christian

Over the past couple of years, social media has shown a rise to a new and rapidly growing subculture known as “looksmaxxing.” This term is known as the practice of maximizing one’s appearance through the same common ways most people through, fitness, fashion, grooming (Healthline 2024), but it has been taken to more extreme levels with some of these influencers going the extra mile. It has always been a part of internet culture to have beauty and self-improvement content online, but this is much more intensified. The BBC reported that, “The aim of looksmaxxing is becoming the most attractive one can possibly look according to a set of prescribed criteria, with particular importance given to jawlines, eyes and physique,”  (2024). While they also stated how these ideas are rooted in incel and “manosphere” subcultures that have been problematic and in opposition to feminism, propagandizing masculinity, and promoting misogyny. Platforms now like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Kick (for livestreaming) have overwhelmed younger men with so much of this content making them feel the need for stronger jawlines, “hunter eyes,” and facial symmetry. Beneath the surface of all of this is a complex intersection of gender expectations, class privilege, and race that can lead to major psychological consequences.

While historically media scrutinizes women’s physical appearances excessively compared to men and reinforces ideas of misogyny and unattainable beauty standards pushed to the front of the algorithm. Now younger men are very susceptible to being subjected to similar pressures with the rise of looksmaxxing culture. They can even be personally judged with some influencers live streaming rankings of them when they are looksmaxxing and giving direct advice. This can be them ranking facial features, encouraging more extreme methods, and routines that promise social and romantic success (The Times 2024). When pushing these narratives, it can be tied to the notions that masculinity and physical perfection equals dominance and worth. When looking deeper into it this reflects elements of hegemonic masculinity, where they make the ideals of male traits, now including physical attractiveness, are elevated as the ideal way to be acting. This reinforces ideas about the hierarchy and the patriarchy (Sage Journals, 2025). 

One of the notable influencers within the looksmaxxing subculture is “Clavicular” (Braden Peters), 20-year-old TikToker and Kick streamer, who has gained traction for his content that promotes highly specific and often extreme interpretations of the extreme male beauty. Some of his videos include him taking part optimizing physical traits such as clavicle width, bone structure ratios, and detailed facial measurements. Some of the methods he has taken to do this are taking testosterone since he was 14 and “bone smashing” where he literally, smashes his jaw to shape his lower face, obviously not recommend by health professionals. This continues to reflect the broader trends within the looksmaxxing community where they believe that they can physically measure parts of their looks. Reinforcing the idea that desirability can be engineered through precise physical modification. While obtaining a large amount of viewers that do see the content as motivational and informative, there are many critics that argue it contributes to unhealthy obsessions with minor or unchangeable feature that intensify body dissatisfaction. Influencers like clavicular exemplify how the algorithm on platforms amplify this extreme content, pushing audiences toward more rigid and exclusionary standards of male beauty.

Class and Race are two of the main aspects of the shaping of these male beauty standards. Many of the influencers in looksmaxxing promote features that align with the white European male, sharp jawlines, narrow noses, lighter skin tones, and specific eye shapes. These ideals marginalize men of color whose features who should be just as appreciated, but their natural features do not conform to the “benchmark,” (Wired, 2024). This phenomenon can be understood through the lens of racialized beauty norms, where whiteness is implicitly or explicitly positioned as the default ideal. Leaving men of color to experience the pressures as well as feeling that it is impossible to meet the standards, who should not have to change their identity for it. Aspects of the skincare and fitness are accessible to an extent, but more practices require significant financial resources sometimes the more extreme, such as cosmetic surgeries and procedures, to optimize the look. This dynamic can lead to class disparities that can feel that only those with more money can attain these transformations. It has been reported that some young men are spending thousands to pursue these ideals, making it seem that attractiveness leads to economic privilege (New York Post, 2024).

The psychological impacts of looksmaxxing culture are continuing to grow especially on younger men, particularly college aged individuals. Constant exposure to these idealized images and transformations can contribute to body dysmorphia and lowered self-esteem, (Healthline, 2024). With social media there is continuous content to compare to and instant feedback through likes and other interactions. This leads to individuals feeling the need to conform to the more interacted with beauty standards they see on others. College is a time where many people are navigating life and gaining new aspects of identity while forming new social groups. Some students feel that their attractiveness directly impacts their social status and confidence. It can result in negative self-perception when these unattainable ideals are at the forefront of college student’s social media.

It is important to address the challenges posed by looksmaxxing. Media literacy is crucial and enabling audiences to critically evaluate what they are consuming and knowing what is constructed by online personas. Educational initiatives can help young men understand the economic and cultural forces that shape the narrative that these influencers hope to continue to feed into and promote their dangerous ideals. It is important to not follow these norms and promote diversity in such a toxic environment online. These looksmaxxing influencers are shifting people’s perception of how they should look when they are going to extremes to do it. Media should show a wider range of body types, facial features, and cultural identities that are all beautiful and should be celebrated. There is not one definition to attractiveness.

The rise of looksmaxxing influencers reflects a shift in the male beauty standard in the age of social media. While it can help some in self-improvement, it also reinforces narrow standards shaped by gender norms, racial hierarchies, and class privilege. The psychological toll this can put onto young men and especially around college aged students shows how we need a change. Journalism and media should prioritize inclusivity and transparency. There is a responsibility to ensuring that representations of beauty do not marginalize and harm other groups but empower all individuals from diverse backgrounds.

Conclusion

What connects these types of influencers and the distinct impact each has on college students is the way influencer content collectively serves to promote beyond just the purchase of products, but the buying into a specific lifestyle. Examining this through the lens of socialization theory, the role of influencers as modern drivers of social development is made evident. Socialization theory argues individuals internalize societal norms, values and behaviors through everyday experiences. As social media has increasingly become a primary site for socialization, it has the simultaneous potential to either disrupt or reinforce systematic inequalities and societal stereotypes.

In order to best navigate this environment, it is crucial for college-aged social media users to practice and maintain their media literacy. Through the critical examination of the context and implicit purpose of influencer content, consumers can transform passive internalization into informed engagement, ensuring digital socialization breaks the reproduction cycle of harmful stereotypes and inequalities.

To have a more positive impact, influencers in general should keep things real with their audience. Being transparent about sponsorships and only promoting products they actually use and trust helps build credibility and makes followers feel like they are not just being sold something. It also reduces the pressure to believe that success or happiness comes from buying certain products. At the same time, it is important for influencers to be open about their setbacks and failures. Sharing the tough moments, whether it is struggles with work, school, or everyday life, helps normalize imperfections and reminds followers that no one has it all together all the time. This kind of honesty makes content feel more relatable and can have a more positive impact on confidence and self-image.