South Park's latest season has turned its attention to two of this year's most pervasive pieces of online slang: "looksmaxxing" and "aura farming." The third episode of the show's 29th season, titled "You Like That On Your Face," aired this week and was reviewed by the Guardian on Thursday, which credited the show with "grotesque glee" in sending up influencer-driven self-improvement culture.
The episode follows Kyle's toddler brother Ike, who takes up looksmaxxing, a practice promoted by online influencers that involves using filters, routines and products to maximize facial symmetry, after being threatened with being "mogged" by a rival in a livestreamed "aura battle." The story also sends Stan and, later, Cartman into a beauty retailer that morphs into the Backrooms, an internet-born horror-liminal-space concept, as the show skewers the popularity of skincare and anti-ageing products among increasingly young shoppers.
Both terms have exploded among younger internet users over the past two years: "aura farming" describes performing effortless, enviable coolness online, while "looksmaxxing" refers to the pursuit of perceived physical perfection, often through dubious means, amplified by rating apps and influencer content. Their jump from TikTok slang to a South Park script is itself a marker of how deeply such trends have embedded themselves in mainstream youth culture.
A show built for this moment
South Park, now in its fourth decade, has long distinguished itself from peers such as The Simpsons by reacting to current events and internet trends with little lag, a trait the Guardian's review argued the show "does better" than any of its animated-sitcom rivals even as other aspects of the series have grown uneven. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have built entire episodes around slang and tech fads before, from NFTs to "cancel culture," often alongside the show's long-running willingness to court controversy with crude or sexualized humor.
The review was largely positive about the episode's premise and execution, calling the Sephora-to-Backrooms sequence "an inspired juxtaposition," while noting that some of its raunchier gags risked undercutting a satire that might otherwise land cleanly with the tween audience most likely to recognize the trends being mocked.
The episode caps with Ike's father, Randy, who has shrunk to child size after one too many anti-ageing treatments, settling the generational aura battle by beating up Ike's rival outright — a punchline the review read as a comment on adults' tendency to clumsily intervene in trends they don't understand rather than offer any real answer.
The episode is streaming now on Paramount+ in the US, UK and Australia, alongside its linear broadcast on Comedy Central, with season 29 continuing weekly under the broader title "South America."
