South Park takes on looksmaxxing, aura-farming and influencer nonsense with grotesque glee

Trey Parker and Matt Stone have always been pretty upfront about how South Park, like all animated sitcoms from the past 35 years, lives in the shadow of The Simpsons. There are plenty of ways that The Simpsons, even in its more uneven recent seasons, still outshines South Park: greater depth of ensemble, stronger emotional moments, even in the sheer number of episodes.

Something that South Park often does better, though, is react to contemporary social trends. Kyle, Stan, Cartman, Kenny and the rest are more or less the same age as Bart (and have been for decades); but The Simpsons has never been as adept at riffing on trends, tech and social issues as South Park, which has always been more immediate and responsive. Perhaps this is why it doesn’t feel like a betrayal to see the boys dealing with, say, looksmaxxing and aura farming, which is exactly what the third episode of South Park’s 29th season addresses.

You Like That On Your Face begins with Cartman breathlessly interrupting Kyle and Stan discussing Wendy’s mysterious desire for anti-ageing face cream with the news that Kyle’s toddler brother Ike is in danger of being “mogged” by another student. But Ike prevails in a livestreamed aura battle because he is now into looksmaxxing, the influencer-driven nonsense practice of using all means necessary to gain greater facial symmetry.

As Stan later explains to his father, Randy, there are apps that will analyse and rate your appearance using AI and suggest products to improve your inevitably terrible score. Though Randy advises closing the app and simply eating well and exercising to take care of your body, he, too, is driven to assess his face on the app. Meanwhile, Ike faces a challenge from Chase Chadwick – the only person to ever get a perfect score from the Chadmaxx app.

So where do all the tweens wind up at different points in the episode, in order to look their best? Sephora, of course, Parker and Stone riffing on the very real popularity of skin creams and beauty products among troublingly young children. Stan takes Wendy there for her birthday and encounters an old man who warns him that his granddaughter went in there six years ago, never to return. As Stan loses track of Wendy and wanders through the store, the familiar shelves and excited crowds drop away, the walls are increasingly yellow, the sights increasingly uncanny … and, whoops, Stan has entered the Backrooms.

It’s an inspired juxtaposition – the capitalist graveyard depicted by the Backrooms with the trendy bustle of Sephora’s decidedly non-liminal space – suggesting (without anyone in the show ever saying so) that there may be less distance between the two than we realise and the dead-end nature of trend-chasing.

Stan is able to escape the Sephora-Backrooms, freaked out but unscathed. Randy, however, comes back diminished to tween size, suddenly to scale with his son and the rest of the kids – the product of anti-ageing procedures working too well, apparently. He’s not the last character to visit Sephora; Kyle has given up attempting to intervene with Ike, so Cartman, never one to shrug off a meaningless totem of popularity, agrees to take the toddler there.

When Stan and Kyle find out Cartman and Ike are in the Sephora-Backrooms (from Randy, who has now enrolled as a student at South America elementary), they rush to the rescue. Various Sephora workers offer various creams with the porny, suggestive phrase that gives the episode its title: “You like that on your face?” they insistently ask. The monstrous Sephora manager in the Backrooms takes it further, squirting lotion from a crotch-positioned bottle as she calls out the gross tagline.

It’s part and parcel with South Park wanting to take things too far, and also kind of a shame; the blatant innuendo takes this episode from being kind of perfect for actual tweens in the midst of skincare routine trend-chasing back to, well, the TV-MA territory the show is known for – even though a younger audience may be the most likely to laugh in recognition of the episode’s absurdity. Then again, what are tweens more likely to seek out than something they’re not really supposed to watch? Maybe this is the best way to make fun of app-mutated self-care without seeming like cringe adults who don’t know what they’re talking about.

The symbolism of a clueless adult barging into the weird realm of young-person trends emerges fully at the end of the episode, when a semi-drunk and still-childish Randy enters the aura battle between Ike and the supposedly “hot” Chase Chadwick (hilariously grotesque) and ends up “mogging” Chase by beating the ever-loving hell out of him. Problem … solved? Adults may not have the answers, but at least they can ruin everyone’s fun with a bloody mess.

• South Park is streaming on Paramount+ in the US, UK and Australia.