Soft Is the New Sexy—A User’s Guide to the Modern Male Heartthrob
In an age where beauty is less about symmetry and more about sensation, a new generation of men are rewriting what it means to be looked at
For most of modern pop culture, male beauty has been an inheritance passed down from a predictable script: square-jawed, stoic, and always just a little untouchable. From Marlon Brando’s sullen smolder to Brad Pitt’s Fight Club physique, the dominant male aesthetic has often reflected weaponized restraint: beautiful, but in a way that insisted it hadn’t noticed.
These are the usual names. The canonized. Marlon Brando, James Dean, Brad Pitt, David Beckham. Men whose faces launched both a thousand gym memberships and an entire generation of fragrance campaigns. But in today’s post-genre media ecosystem, where a video can catapult a previously unknown face into international consciousness, beauty is less about symmetry and more about sensation. What a man makes you feel is now just as defining as how he looks. And in this more fluid world, a new wave of icons has emerged. They are both handsome and compelling. Their beauty tells a story of contradiction, softness, flamboyance, grief, and joy.
Timothée Chalamet
Take Timothée, for instance. He has become a shorthand for a new male delicacy: porcelain skin, hollow cheeks, and a gaze that flutters between knowing and unsure. In Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, his vulnerability is physical as he wears it like wet linen. There is no hard edge, no studied masculinity. And yet, no one could call him weak. Timothée was not the first to unman the man, but he made it legible for a younger generation.
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A$AP Rocky
The rapper has done more for Black male beauty than most Hollywood actors. Rocky’s aesthetic is aqueous, slippery, and genre-defying. He wears nail polish, cropped tanks, diamond grills, and Chanel pearls. He walks Paris runways and raps with both bravado and softness. His beauty is in the way he refuses to be framed.
Kim Mingyu
Elsewhere, Asian representation in global pop culture, long boxed into stereotypes, has found breakout moments that bend beauty norms. Mingyu of SEVENTEEN fame is one such figure. With his baritone voice and barefaced candor, he moves between K-pop polish and shirtless honesty. He sweats. He raps. He talks about anxiety. Mingyu’s appeal is in the sharpness of his jawline and his willingness to blur the line between idol and individual.
V / Kim Taehyung
Even more striking is V of BTS. His face is practically surreal in its beauty: a jawline that belongs to a Renaissance painting and eyes that look perpetually rimmed with emotion. But it’s his androgyny, his unapologetic flirtation with femininity and his deep voice offset by pearl earrings and blouses, that has made him an icon. In Asia, his look is aspirational not because it conforms, but because it complicates.
Jacob Elordi
Then there’s Jacob, the Australian actor who has become the face of a more melancholic masculinity. Tall, cinematic, and brooding, Jacob evokes the broody grandeur of classic Hollywood, but with a youthful fatalism. In Euphoria, he plays Nate with a terrifying vulnerability, which conceals deep repression under a perfect face. Offscreen, he wears Bottega Veneta and vintage leather.
Nanon Korapat
Other rising figures include Thai actor Nanon, whose work in queer-centric storylines and offscreen fashion play has cast him as a heartthrob for the emotionally literate. And in doing so, it proposes a new rule: men can be tender and still be seen.
These men, whether chart-toppers or indie darlings, K-drama leads or local creatives, offer a reimagined male beauty that is deeply narrative. No longer defined by stoicism or symmetry alone, they are beautiful because they express. They are beautiful because they are looking back.
And that’s the real shift. Beauty is no longer what looks good on a man, it’s what looks through him. In this age of curated selves and hyper-visibility, the most iconic faces are not those that project power, but those that reflect something intimate, even fragile.
The mirror, it seems, has cracked. And through that fracture, something more interesting is coming into view.
Photos courtesy IMDB, Instagram, Innisfree, Big Hit Music, Bottega Veneta
