Adult performers represent a wide variety of human characteristics, ethnicities and ages, ranging from people who look perfectly regular to all sorts of extremes. As a result, trying to narrow their appearances down to something measurable is often a futile effort, especially due to the internal mechanisms of the algorithms which ultimately govern someone’s popularity on basically all social media sites, with pornography arguably being inherently social in nature and commonly being accessed via sites which are quite distinct from the classical adult movie store section which are of course far more traditional in its available transactions & interactions.

The (in)famous “pornstar” look can consequently range from a highly popular “amateur“ models to people who use entire make up crews, professional editing and surgery etc.

Furthermore, looking at entertainment in general, the influence of internet pornography on mainstream culture is quite undeniable. Pop music, high fashion or movies / series etc. often play with boundaries of the acceptable or even break social conventions entirely, with the lines between soft core pornography and many revealing outfits and performances becoming increasingly blurred.

The reason why I mention this is because to assess the validity of the compliment ( not weather or not it’s an OBJECTIVELY good one but weather or not it can be SUBJECTIVELY good ) we have imo. to establish and examine the current social atmosphere and in this context, one will inevitably arrive at the conclusion that this IS a compliment.

I am NOT saying it’s a, as objectively as is scientifically possible, GOOD compliment. Just that it is at least A compliment.

Conclusion: I would consequently argue that someone telling someone that “they could be a pornstar” can be meant as an honest and even friendly compliment ( obviously not a socially adapt one but still ), while it’s certainly also a primitive one, the commonly implied effect of calling of a “whore” tend to have quite a different desired outcome than telling someone that their perceived physical attractiveness can in the opinion of the onlooker match some of the most popular adult performers on the planet and as a result, you are wrong about your assessment because you changed the original wording from “you look like you could be desired by millions” to “you look like you sell your body for money” to make your point and while both are technically accurate, the ( positive ) implications of the former are commonly at odds with the implications of the latter.

Finally; a little while ago telling someone they looked like an actress was an insult. Note I didn’t write an adult actress but simply a movie or theater actor.

The perception at the time was very different than what people will most likely mean today when they say “you look like a movie star”.

Not that I am NOT comparing pornstars to movie stars. I am merely comparing the change in public perception.

TLDR: it’s not a universally good compliment ( duh ) , but it still is a compliment.

And since attractiveness is subjective and not objective and pornstars ARE at the very least well enough liked enough visually by a couple dozen million people, some perhaps even billions and can in general represent a wide variety of ethnicities and ages, narrowing down a universal pornstar look is a fairly futile effort.