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The PERFECT Man Around The World

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Ideal Masculinity Varies by Culture

A lumberjack beard that plays in Portland gets you laughed out of Seoul. A tan, gym-built frame that turns heads on Copacabana Beach barely registers in a culture built around porcelain skin and sculpted cheekbones. TheThings Celebrity’s video “The PERFECT Man Around The World” spends five minutes and 23 seconds walking through exactly how wide that gap really is, and how much a single passport stamp can change what “attractive” even means.

• The video, produced by TheThings Celebrity under the TheTalko network, runs 5 minutes and 23 seconds and breaks down male beauty standards country by country.
• It builds directly on BuzzFeed’s viral 2015 project “Men’s Standards Of Beauty Around The World,” which first popularized the country-by-country comparison format.
• The video contrasts North America and parts of Europe’s muscular, “lumbersexual” bearded look with South Korea’s sculpted, heavily groomed K-pop aesthetic and the tan, athletic build favored in Brazil and Australia.

The Lumbersexual Standard Versus the K-Pop Face

In the U.S. and much of Europe, the video’s version of the ideal man still leans on the “lumbersexual” template that took over men’s grooming culture in the mid-2010s: thick facial hair, a broad, muscular build, and a rugged, outdoorsy edge that reads as masculine without much fuss over skincare routines. It’s the same silhouette that’s made stars like Jason Momoa into physical benchmarks, and it’s worth noting how much of that image is really about volume — beard, shoulders, presence — rather than precision.

South Korea flips that script almost entirely. The video points to the K-pop aesthetic as its own distinct standard: lean, sculpted features, flawless skin from multi-step routines, and a groomed, almost delicate look that would read as understated anywhere else but is the dominant male beauty template across Korean pop culture and advertising. Where the North American ideal is about bulk, the Korean one is about precision and polish.

Sun, Skin, and the Brazil-Australia Standard

Brazil and Australia get grouped together in the video for a shared emphasis on tan, athletic tone over sheer size. It’s less about how much muscle a man is carrying and more about how lean and sun-kissed he looks carrying it — a beach-culture standard that prizes visible fitness over the bulkier, gym-built frame favored elsewhere. The video uses these regional splits to make its central point: there’s no single “perfect man,” just a rotating set of regional preferences that happen to dominate media in their own corners of the world.

What’s considered the ideal male body in one country can look completely unremarkable — or even undesirable — in another.

Inspiration or Pressure

The video doesn’t just catalogue looks — it asks whether all this side-by-side comparison actually helps men or just adds another layer of anxiety. On one hand, seeing a rotating gallery of “ideal” physiques, from lumbersexual bulk to K-pop precision, can double as fitness motivation, the same way a 24-hour workout stunt or a body transformation story gives people a concrete goal to chase. On the other, stacking those standards side by side is exactly the kind of mass-media comparison that’s been tied to rising self-esteem issues and body-image strain in men, a conversation that’s only gotten louder since BuzzFeed’s original 2015 project went viral and spawned a wave of copycat breakdowns.

That tension is really the engine of the video. It doesn’t pick a side so much as lay out the contradiction: global media makes it easier than ever to see what’s considered attractive on the other side of the planet, and harder than ever to feel like you’re measuring up to any of it at once.

TheThings Celebrity built its five-minute breakdown almost entirely on visual contrast — beard versus bare skin, bulk versus lean, tan versus pale — without ever landing on a single verdict about which standard “wins.” That’s probably the smartest choice in the whole video: the second you crown one country’s ideal as the objectively correct one, you’ve basically proven the point the video was making in the first place.