The third episode of South Park's 29th season, titled You Like That On Your Face, tackles looksmaxxing, aura farming and influencer-driven self-care with the show's signature grotesque humour. The story follows the boys as they head into Sephora and eventually the Backrooms in a tale that mocks app-mutated self-care.
Creator Trey Parker and Matt Stone have long acknowledged that South Park, like all animated sitcoms of the past 35 years, lives in the shadow of The Simpsons. The Simpsons still outshines South Park in several ways, including greater depth of ensemble, stronger emotional moments and sheer episode count. But South Park often excels at reacting to contemporary social trends with more immediacy and responsiveness than its rival.
The plot: Ike's aura battle and Chadmaxx app
The episode opens with Cartman interrupting Kyle and Stan's discussion about Wendy's desire for anti-ageing face cream. Cartman warns that Kyle's toddler brother Ike is in danger of being “mogged” by another student. Ike prevails in a livestreamed aura battle because he has embraced looksmaxxing, the influencer-driven practice of using all means to achieve greater facial symmetry.
Stan later explains to his father Randy that apps can analyse and rate your appearance using AI, suggesting products to improve your inevitably terrible score. Randy advises closing the app and simply eating well and exercising, but he too ends up assessing his face on the app. Meanwhile, Ike faces a challenge from Chase Chadwick, the only person to ever get a perfect score on the Chadmaxx app.
Inside the Sephora-Backrooms
The tweens wind up at Sephora, riffing on the real popularity of skin creams and beauty products among young children. Stan takes Wendy there for her birthday and encounters an old man who warns him that his granddaughter went in six years ago and never returned. As Stan loses track of Wendy, the shelves and crowds drop away, the walls turn increasingly yellow, and he has entered the Backrooms.
The juxtaposition suggests there may be less distance between the capitalist graveyard of the Backrooms and the trendy bustle of Sephora than we realise, highlighting the dead-end nature of trend-chasing.
Stan escapes the Sephora-Backrooms freaked out but unscathed. Randy, however, returns diminished to tween size after anti-ageing procedures work too well. Kyle gives up intervening with Ike, so Cartman agrees to take the toddler to Sephora. When Stan and Kyle learn Cartman and Ike are in the Sephora-Backrooms, they rush to the rescue.
Innuendo and final message
Various Sephora workers offer creams with the suggestive phrase that gives the episode its title: “You like that on your face?” The monstrous Sephora manager in the Backrooms takes it further, squirting lotion from a crotch-positioned bottle while calling out the tagline.
The blatant innuendo takes the episode from being potentially perfect for actual tweens caught up in skincare trend-chasing back to TV-MA territory, even though a younger audience may be most likely to laugh in recognition of the absurdity. The symbolism of a clueless adult barging into the realm of young-person trends emerges fully at the end, when a semi-drunk and still-childish Randy enters the aura battle between Ike and Chase Chadwick, ending up “mogging” Chase by beating him up.
South Park is streaming on Paramount+ in the US, UK and Australia.
