Viral video mixing beauty, class and genetics sparks debate

The high school video that ended in a debate about class and genes

A group of girls appears in their high school class photo. Next to it, the same scene years later. The montage is circulating online. What is striking is not the comparison itself, but how far the commentary has gone: from beauty to postcode, from there to surname, and ultimately to a discussion about genetics that no one has backed up with a single piece of data.

The clip compares the before and after of a group identified as former pupils of the same school, located by some comments in Madrid. The comments debate whether they have kept or improved their looks over the years, and there is no agreement. The next step is where things get tangled: the result is attributed to their having attended a posh private school, and from there it jumps to generalising about who is good-looking and who is not based on where they studied.

Why is beauty linked to posh schools?

The most repeated hypothesis is not about aesthetics, but about background. In upper-class schools, the argument goes, a supposedly better genetic make-up coincides with self-care habits that would produce a more physically homogeneous student body. The same line of thinking holds that in lower-income neighbourhoods the mix is greater and the result, in their view, less uniform.

This is where data and opinion need to be separated. It is fair to debate whether socioeconomic status influences access to certain self-care habits; drawing from that a judgement about the beauty of an entire neighbourhood is a very different matter. And in practice, those judgements almost always end up targeting a specific group, turning a supposed aesthetic observation into a derogatory label.

The leap to genetics and origins

The second act of the exchange is the most predictable and the crudest. Part of the comments claims that what is seen in the video reflects a supposed genetic improvement of certain classes, and sets that group against the population of poorer areas or of migrant origin, which they describe with contempt. These are claims with no statistical backing whatsoever and an unmistakable whiff of eugenics.

There are no studies measuring beauty by postcode or surname. It is fair to debate whether socioeconomic status influences access to aesthetic care; a hunch about neighbourhoods and races cannot be presented as if it were biology. The material itself gives it away: when the arguments try to get specific, they amount to anecdotes and surnames that prove nothing.

The theory that the video was manipulated with artificial intelligence

Some people believe none of it. One of the responses claims the video was made the other way round: that the women were filmed as adults first, and their faces were then de-aged with artificial intelligence to fake the class photo. It is an explanation impossible to verify with what is on the table, but it illustrates just how broken trust in any image circulating online has become. When the tool to fabricate a fake before and after is within anyone's reach, suspicion becomes an automatic reflex.

Instagram and disillusionment with today's beauty standards

Beneath the aesthetic debate lies an older complaint: that the role models of twenty years ago were better. One idea running through the thread is that social media has ruined taste and homogenised bodies. It is the eternal nostalgia for the past, but now mixed with a different nuance: the feeling that today's beauty standards are the product of filters, retouching and editing, and that the comparison the video proposes is, for that very reason, a cheat.

Women are not a catalogue

The most uncomfortable response for everyone else comes from within. One of the messages flatly rejects the whole exercise: women are not a catalogue, nor are they there to be rated as if at an auction. It points out that each woman's private life — who she dates, who she stops dating — is nobody else's business. And it states the obvious: that anyone scandalised by a detail of a former classmate's life is projecting more than they realise.

That counterpoint does not stop the rest of the conversation, but it makes clear that the issue has two levels. In one, people discuss standards and classes, with more or less grace. In the other, the question is whether doing so makes any sense at all.

The video started out being about a group of friends. It ended up being about surnames, regions and centuries of supposed inbreeding. And of the women at its centre, not one has come forward to respond.