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About six months into her last relationship, Sarah*, a 23-year-old from Australia, noticed her body was changing. She mysteriously—and rapidly—shed 11 pounds and regularly awoke with nausea or acid reflux. “My hair was thin and dry; you wouldn’t have known I had curly hair because the texture completely changed, and I had the most frustrating bumps and pimples all over my forehead,” she says.
When the relationship ended two years later, Sarah redirected her energy to self-care, which had a remarkable effect. “I would take my time washing my face or my hair, and it was like I was in a flow state. All the pimples completely disappeared a month after the breakup, my curls are back, and now I’ve never looked better or felt more confident,” she says.
It’s well documented that a souring relationship can increase your chances of anxiety, eating disorders, and emotional issues. But, like Sarah, a growing chorus of women on social media think it can make you ugly, too.
Case in point, Popular creator Snarly Carly shared a video explaining this phenomenon in TikTok parlance. (The comments speak for themselves.) Another creator, @heyitsmekmac shared the experience of her own “glow-down,” saying that, “The wrong men make you ugly. My face was broken out, the cortisol levels were high, water weight was through the roof… If he’s stressing you out, he [sic] gotta go.”
A handful of women voicing their experiences on Instagram and Reddit separately told Allure their male partner had a deleterious effect on their appearance, a notion supported by preexisting research into psychology, health and relationships. In heterosexual relationships, women who receive appearance-related criticism from their partner experience diminished self-worth and reduced relationship satisfaction, and experts point to a few different factors.
Women often process relationship stress differently than men. Psychotherapist Laurel Steinberg, PhD, says this could be due to an unequal mental and emotional load women are expected to carry in heterosexual relationships. In situations where partners live together, society often expects women to shoulder the burdens of home life and, as a result, “When the culture at home is strained, women can feel more guilt and shame than their partners, leading them to experience chronic stress and poorer health markers.” This inequity not only impacts women psychologically, but physically.
Research indicates that stress can be a key driver in cosmetic issues like acne and hair loss. Once these physical issues arise, the toll goes further than skin deep. For example, researchers found that the psychosocial impact of thinning hair is significant, provoking anxiety that is disproportionate to its “objective severity.” In other words, even if the physical impacts aren’t immediately obvious to others, women can become distressed by these changes. Generally, once the stressor (in these specific cases, the male partner) is removed, women start to feel like themselves again.
The post-breakup glow-up is very real. According to Lara Devgan, MD, a board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon in New York City, “A toxic partner can keep you in a near-constant stress response… Sometimes the most powerful beauty intervention is removing the thing that is exhausting you, whether it is a bad boyfriend or something else.”
In addition to a reduction in stress, Dr. Devgan says that people often experience positive physical changes after a breakup because they reinvest time in themselves, leading to better sleep, nutrition, and a more consistent skincare routine. As Keira Barr, MD, board certified dermatologist and founder of Center for Mind Skin Medicine in Bend, Ore., explains, “When a woman begins treating herself gently again after a relationship that didn’t feel gentle, she is giving her body very different sensory and relational information. That post-breakup glow may be what it looks like when a body that has spent months or years organized around protection finally has more room for repair, restoration and connection.”
While there’s anecdotal evidence that the wrong boyfriend can affect your appearance, Dr. Barr explains there can be physiological underpinning to the argument. “Heightened cortisol levels and inflammatory signaling can send the skin down a path of breakouts, sensitivity, dehydration, dullness, slower healing, and a generally less rested appearance,” she says.
A study between Howard University, the University of Montréal and Montréal’s Mental Health University Institute published in 2023 looked into the effects of long-term relationships in heterosexual couples. Across over 2,000 couples and after four years, women’s allostatic load markers (which measure the burden of stress on the body) were more strongly associated with their male partners’ than vice versa, suggesting a greater physiological impact on women, with the association persisting in happy and unhappy relationships alike.
Some social media users claim that their boyfriend’s bad habits resulted in everything from cavities to recurring bacterial vaginosis. A particularly vivid example comes from Ava*, who says that she “used to get UTIs like crazy” with a previous boyfriend. She would always experience a flare-up a day or two after having sex but couldn’t figure out the cause until she caught him coming out of the bathroom. “He didn’t wash his hands. I jokingly said something about it, and he just turns to me and said, 'Yeah, I never really wash my hands.'” They broke up shortly thereafter, and the UTIs never returned, even with different partners.
Los Angeles-based clinical psychologist and couples therapist Molly Burrets, PhD, confirmed a similar theory that the body can reject a relationship before our psyches catch up. “I think it’s not just possible, it’s typical,” she says. Dr. Burrets explains that stress isn’t immediately processed through our conscious mind but through interoception—our ambient sense of what’s going on around us and in our bodies—and neuroception, an internal system that scans for cues of safety or threat in tone of voice, facial expressions or energy in a room.
These primitive instincts are highly attuned to potential danger and are often triggered before our conscious mind registers that something isn’t right. As Dr. Burrets says, “When we're in a relationship that feels unsafe, unpredictable, or emotionally depleting, our nervous system reads that as a threat, even if no one's raising a voice. A nervous system that's perceiving a threat doesn't know the difference between ‘my partner is criticizing me’ and ‘I'm being chased by a predator.’ It just mobilizes.”
Several of Dr. Burrets’s clients suffered physically during their stressful relationships. While there can be other contributing factors beyond relationships, some of the regular symptoms she encounters are: chronic fatigue that doesn’t resolve with sleep, miscellaneous gut issues, body tension (she half-jokes that she can map someone’s attachment history by where they hold their stress), sleep disruption, regular illness due to immune dysfunction and a racing heart or shallow breathing around specific triggers. On the appearance side, she’s seen chronic stress manifest as sudden hair thinning or shedding, skin breaking out or going dull, dark circles that don’t budge no matter how much sleep someone got, and noticeable weight loss or gain.
Dr. Burrets says that it is possible to get your glow back once a problematic relationship ends: “I almost universally hear some version of ‘I have so much more energy’ — not because their life got easier, but because their nervous system isn't spending all day, every day, scanning for threat. That vigilance is exhausting, even when you're not consciously aware you're doing it,” she says.
Maybe those social media cries from women whose “boyfriends made them ugly” is not just an empty online trend. Bad behavior in a relationship can make one suffer on physical, emotional, and aesthetic levels. So, maybe if you have an unsupportive boyfriend, you can add your acne to your list of reasons for dumping him.
*Indicates a pseudonym used for privacy.
