Last week, The Atlantic’s Taylor Lorenz tweeted about an Instagram ad for an insane-looking app called Manly. Her bemusing discovery went viral, and for good reason: The ad portrays a man bun-having, sunglasses-wearing, swim trunk-sporting guy who has miraculously upped his coolness and hotness quotients to previously unknown heights. All he had to do was drag his finger across the Manly app’s slider a few times, unleashing an entirely new body featuring rock-hard abs, chiseled pecs and arms, and a flawless post-vacation tan.
Those of you wondering what sort of person would ever actually use such an app might be surprised. Manly has 5,633 ratings in the Apple App Store, and though a nice chunk of those reviews are of dubious origin—more on that in a minute—people do use this thing. Sensor Tower, an app analytics company, estimates that Manly had 300,000 downloads … last month.
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“In this era of social media, we believe our customizable digital body image is part of an expression of our fashion style,” explained Cheuk Yin, Manly’s product designer, in an email to GQ. “With the help of technology, we are free to create our own image that project of our idealized self to show others who we want to be or who we are.”
Lest it need to be clarified, using Manly for anything other than mindless entertainment—say, misrepresenting your physique on a dating app—is a very dumb, very bad choice. (Also, one that will be discovered … immediately.) Yet Yin does not dissuade Manly fans from doing just that. “We know that many of our users love to enhance their dating profile pictures to look more attractive and get more likes, but I believe that users are very smart, so we focus on empowering them to let them decide how and where to use their edited pictures,” Yin says.
For those who are curious about how they’d look with the forearm ink of their dreams, a word of caution: Lots of users have complained about what happens after downloading the ostensibly “free” app, as most of the premium features involved, which range from tribal tattoos to facial hair to bulging muscles, cost a bunch of money after the trial ends. (Yin says that “users can cancel the subscription anytime within or after the free trial period, but some of the users might have missed the payment detail, been charged a monthly fee, and then left us a bad review.”)
As it turns out, the premium features model is the norm for Manly’s parent company, Alpha Mobile Limited, which Yin says is a 70-employee startup in Beijing. Manly is oriented to cis males, but Alpha Mobile makes apps for anyone interested in body “enhancers”: BodyApp advertises its ability to “retouchify” abs, butts, and muscles. Photable is for “body slimming.” Facey is for whitening teeth and adding eyelashes. The company doesn’t have much of an Internet presence beyond a barebones website, and notably, the only thing the FAQ section answers is how to get a refund after accidentally signing up for a premium membership.
Reviews for Manly in the App Store, for the record, are overwhelmingly positive—but again, there are some possible red flags. Sensor Tower data shows the positive reviews tend to arrive en masse: Between September 22 and October 17, there was nary a single positive review. But from October 18 through October 30, there were 180 positive reviews, including 48 on October 29 and 26 on October 30—which happened to be the day before a version update went live. Several of the enthusiastic blurbs appear more than once.
For non-App Store reviews, we consulted a few women staffers at GQ about the wisdom of using Manly in an unironic fashion. The consensus, as you might guess: You cannot—repeat, cannot—get away with faking your physical existence on a dating app. “If you are vanilla and insecure enough to add a fake six-pack to your body, you certainly do not have enough of a personality to make up for the lack of that six-pack in person,” one respondent said. When asked if a misguided but earnest Manly user could ever overcome their fake bod after meeting in person, another responded as follows: “Absolutely not. Walking fake news. Not in this economy.”
Fake muscles are bad. Fake tattoos are bad. Authenticity is good. Especially in this economy.