Algernon
Iron
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- Mar 17, 2026
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Introduction
With the recent rise of greycels such as myself, a lot of old looksmax language has died. Specifically, appeal and SMV, now the only words used are stuff like mog, -cel, -max, water, dnr and hormones.
With this decrease in usage of specific language, people have forgotten of many old stuff that accurately describes things, specifically the grouping of HTN as now both a facial and non-facial metric has made things confusing. For example, some people refer to HTN as only your face (PSL interpretation), while some refer to a tall facial MTN as an HTN (SMV interpretation).
This can lead to problems where MTN now has no meaning, since an LTN can be rated MTN or even HTN (by heightpilled users who believe height is more important then it really is) based on his height. Not even just height, but even in strictly facial ratings, an objective MTN will get ranges from LTN to HTN, this is because his face likely has specific appeals (piercing, tattoos, ethnic features) to difference subgroups of women.
Part 1: Niches vs Appeal
Appeal refers to a broad audience of women, for example a high appeal HTN, he is objectively HTN to all women, however due to his appeal, he may be liked by a wider audience of women. An example of a specific appeal would be race, some women prefer to date in/out their race even if he is an objectively attractive man.
Niches specifically refer to the attempt of men to appeal to a specific type of women, it may close their appeal to general women but they are typically set on one type of women.
If they want for example nerdy women? They'll wear nerdy clothing.
If they want religious women? They'll go to a place of worship and look standard (no piercings, tattoos, etc).
Some say niches are cope, I personally have no experience dating so I don't have an answer, you can reply what you think.
For more details, I got some of my information from this thread "https://forum.looksmaxxing.com/threads/explaining-the-difference-between-psl-and-appeal.18779/" (idk if i'm allowed to cite .com)
Lastly, PSL does not affect your appeal or niches. If you are HTN facially, only looksmaxxing will change your PSL, not changing your appeal or niche. However, they do affect SMV, which I will talk about in the next part.
Part 2: PSL vs SMV
PSL is the scale we use for facial ratings, I'm sure you know but it goes as follows.
Ratings, descending. Rating (Abbreviation).
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You can also put low, mid, and high (L, M, and H in abbreviations) to indicate where it is in the scale (LLTB, MLTB) with greater detail.
A high effort thread to see the differences in PSL would be https://looksmax.org/threads/my-rating-guide-high-effort-thread.1963646/#post-27347488
SMV does not have a standardized scale like PSL although we could make one, the only real categories are Truecel and Incel, with higher ratings typically just called Normie or Chad (still, no standardly accepted terminology). Typically the prefix Giga or Tera before Chad implies they are talking about SMV, not PSL.
SMV stands for Sexual Market Value, which is your overall features. This includes height, muscles, frame, wrist size, penis size, neck size, and essentially the rest of your body, including social features such as being NT, jester, status. SMV includes niches and appeals.
SMV is mostly mixed, meaning no one really has an objective way to calculate it (it is objective and calculable, someone could technically make a formula of your characteristics and calculate it).
Conclusion
In order to accurately judge people's dating ability, we should come up with an objective SMV framework that can be put into a formula. Otherwise, people will continue to randomly say HTN, LTN, with no understanding until PSL has no meaning at all, similar to the word Larp.
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