UO researchers and colleagues find people prefer to follow those who are more like them
Story by Nick Houtman
October 7, 2025
Like everything from cooking to personal finance, exercise and fitness have exploded online. People with toned abs and bulging biceps powering through tough workouts are regulars on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms.
Not surprisingly, physical beauty plays a significant role in whether people follow individual online fitness influencers, aka "fitfluencers." Marketing professionals have long known that sex sells, but a study by researchers at the University of Oregon and University of Dayton has found that extreme attractiveness can turn some people away.
They have dubbed this phenomenon the "beauty backfire effect."
"There are lots of influencers across a variety of domains, like cooking, finance and homemaking," said Abby Frank, a doctoral candidate in the UO's Lundquist College of Business who helped conduct the study of how online consumers respond to fitness presenters. "While attractiveness helps in all of those, we find that that gap between extreme and moderate beauty exists most strongly in the fitness domain, where people want to engage with highly attractive fitness influencers less."
Understanding that effect has real-world implications. In addition to commercial branding sponsorships, fitfluencers sell nutritional products, clothing and exercise equipment. Estimates of their combined annual revenues range as high as $25 billion in 2024.
Frank worked with Andrew Edelblum, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Dayton, who received his doctorate in marketing at UO in 2022. Edelblum specializes in the social dynamics of marketing online and in other spaces.
Together with Justin Palmer, a then-undergraduate student at Dayton, Frank and Edelblum surveyed people about their reactions to fitfluencer posts. Survey recipients were asked to rate fitfluencers for how helpful and relatable they were and whether recipients would subscribe to and follow them.
In the journal Psychology and Marketing, the researchers reported that "… highly attractive fitfluencers elicit lower engagement (i.e., liking and following intentions) than their moderately attractive counterparts."
Female fitfluencers, Edelblum said, face an effect that is about 4.5 times stronger than the one for males.
"We already know that conventionally attractive women face discrimination in the workplace," he said.
Body image concerns are well documented among women on social media, the researchers wrote, and it may not be surprising that female fitfluencers face greater scrutiny and appearance‐based judgments than do their male peers.
All three researchers engage in regular exercise themselves and follow fitfluencers online. Edelblum and Palmer conceived the study after comparing fitfluencers who post photos of themselves exercising with those who post only text. They expected that adding photos would boost engagement.
"We were surprised to find that it was the exact opposite," Edelblum said. "In fact, the text-only post that we ran did significantly better when it came to engagement as measured by intentions to like the post and follow the creator that posted it."
That finding puzzled the researchers, so they reviewed other studies of online engagement and speculated about the importance of physical attractiveness.
"Was there something about those people? Maybe they're just too attractive?" Edelblum said. "Maybe the presenters were too hot for the average person to really relate to. That's where the idea was born."
Other researchers, they wrote, had found that physical attractiveness affects a fitfluencer's credibility and legitimacy. So Edelblum, Frank and Palmer set out to isolate attractiveness as a factor in relatability and engagement.
Through the Insights Research Lab in the Lundquist College of Business, the researchers conducted three online surveys of people across the country. First, they needed to rank fitfluencers by physical attractiveness, so the researchers pre-tested images of fitness presenters and asked respondents to rank them according to their own beauty standards.
Respondents were then asked to rate fitfluencers' posts for helpfulness, relatability and engagement. The researchers also compared fitfluencers with people who offer financial advice, aka "finfluencers."
In a third survey, the researchers considered a strategy for highly attractive fitfluencers to moderate the beauty backfire effect. They found that "adopting a humble tone can significantly counteract this association and foster a stronger connection with the audience."
The researchers note that fitfluencers walk a fine line between physical attractiveness and engagement.
"I follow a lot of fitness influencers," Frank said. "The ones who I think have the most compelling content end up being the ones who say, 'Look, I've been where you are. This is hard. I work hard every day.' So we want people who are at our level or slightly higher than our level. But when a goal becomes too distant, it becomes hard to even want to engage with that person."
