Young men in bathrooms and bedrooms fix themselves on a scale via social media communities. Then, they agonize over their appearance and devise “soft” and “hard” ways to improve it. 

Welcome to the era of “looksmaxxing, " which has taken over the manosphere and is creating a new aesthetic vocabulary in the process. 

Underpinning it is a purportedly “objective” scale of attractiveness, based on such traits as “facial harmony,” balance, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism, to rank people on a scale from zero to eight, with eight being the highest (aka, in looksmaxing parlance, a “Giga Chad”) and zero the lowest (or what the phenomenon terms “subhuman.”) 

It doesn’t stop there; there are subcategories. Soft looksmaxxing involves skincare and grooming, fitness, and diet. There are specific techniques, such as “mewing”—pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth—that are supposed to enhance your jawline, as well as eyelid pulling in pursuit of “hunter eyes." Some even embrace “starvemaxxing” (not eating) to make the face thinner.  

Then there is hard looksmaxxing, which is more extreme: fillers and injectables to define the jaw or lips, rhinoplasty, chin implants, hair transplants, and unapproved chemicals for muscle growth. 

And, finally, there is “bonesmashing,” which involves young men striking their own faces with hammers based on the 19th-century theory that repeated blunt trauma will cause the facial bones to heal back harder, more angular, more masculine. It doesn’t work—but it can cause swelling, microfractures, nerve damage, disfigurement, and even serious permanent injury. We don’t know how many boys do pick up a hammer with this goal in mind, but videos with the phrase “bone smashing tutorial” have garnered more than 250 million views on TikTok. 

The videos were so popular that TikTok introduced community guidelines on April 3 to stop people searching for the phrase. 

If it sounds like a lot, it is. But while those of us not living in the manosphere may look down on, or laugh at, this phenomenon, it is only the latest extreme version of a broader societal obsession with facial perfection.

We see it everywhere, even if we don’t always have a term for it. Every awards season, we watch celebrities walk the red carpet, most with faces that are perfectly proportioned, surgically refined, and wrinkle-free; some with faces sculpted by practitioners whose bills run to six figures. We might critique such stars—too thin, too old, bad dress, too much Botox—but we don’t wonder at our own fixation or see their carefully cultivated faces as a sign of a broken society which extends far beyond Hollywood. 

The distance between a red carpet below flashing cameras and a bathmat below a bathroom vanity may seem vast, but the logic is similar. Both the A-lister and the looksmaxxer operate on the same unexamined belief: that the face is the primary measure of human worth, and that it can and must be optimized. 

The biggest difference between these worlds is resources. Bradley Cooper’s face, which inspired debates about whether he had fillers, is career capital. But the boy with the hammer may see his face as his only capital. 

This trend is not, therefore, just a symptom of social media, though social media made it visible. And nor is it just a symptom of the manosphere, though the manosphere shaped its language and cruelty. It is a symptom of what happens to young men when other sources of value, meaning, and belonging become inaccessible, and they are left alone with their reflections.

The looksmaxxing landscape

To understand where we’ve ended up, it’s worth looking back to when the current craze started. 

Looksmaxxing has its roots in incel message boards of the 2010s—those online spaces for men who identified as “involuntarily celibate” blamed their romantic failures on biological determinism and elaborate (often Eurocentric and chauvinistic) taxonomies of attraction: the strength of a jawline, the width of a chin, the angle of the eyes. From those forums, the logic migrated to TikTok and Instagram, where the algorithm found an audience of lonely, insecure young men who wanted more attention or acceptance in their own lives.

The pandemic accelerated this trend. Boys stuck at home, on screens, staring at their own faces without the grounding of school or sport or physical community, found in forums something that looked like belonging. Sites like looksmax.org became hubs where boys primarily share techniques and brutally rate each other's faces.

These hubs pose as a “community,” but in truth don’t offer peer support. Rather, it is competitive cruelty dressed as self-improvement: a worldview in which the only way to prove what a man you are is to win by subjugating others.

The faces of looksmaxxing

The faces of this phenomenon reflect a very specific vision of how to calculate a person’s value. 

Take Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho, who has become the movement's mascot. The villain’s extensive exercise and grooming routines, including ice packs, a honey almond body scrub, and 1,000 crunches, have been stripped of their satirical intent and copied by young men. Buy “T boosting” supplements to boost your muscle mass, take methamphetamine to suppress your appetite, and end with a face mask, they’ll say. The results are shared by aspiring “sigma males,” the manosphere’s definition of an introverted, successful, hyper-independent guy. 

But the path to achieving sigma status can be treacherous at worst, and nebulous at best. Whether it is bonesmashing or mewing, many looksmaxxing routines simply do not hold up to scientific scrutiny. And, of course, the suggestion that facial structure has anything to do with a person's character, intelligence, or worth doesn’t hold up either.

To defend the idea of sigma superiority, the movement cites distorted evolutionary theory, Roman sculpture, and the “golden ratio.” In this way, looksmaxxing is the modern response to centuries-long beliefs about the value of facial aesthetics—the worst excesses of physiognomic racism and eugenics set to a new beat. 

This beat pumps the heart of the current cultural moment. The altered appearances of billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos represent the kind of transformation that is possible when you have the resources to achieve it. But the manosphere tends to interpret their new looks as evidence that optimization brings power, relevance, and success. 

This interpretation has been perpetuated by influencers such as Braden Peters, who goes by the name Clavicular. In many ways, Clavicular has become the face of the modern looksmaxxing movement. But as the negative impacts of the looksmaxxing culture became more widely known, many of his own fans began to question his dangerous advice. 

By April, his YouTube channels were permanently terminated for “severe or repeated violations.”

In response, Clavicular took to X, calling YouTube’s decision “very sad news” and describing his content as “free courses created by me to help empower young men to be the best versions of themselves.”

How looksmaxxing impacts young men

Ultimately, the key question may be: how “empowered” are the consumers of this content really? 

According to TikTok’s own data, young men between 18 and 24 are the most likely to search for terms like “bone smashing” and its variants, with more than 300,000 looksmaxxing-related searches per day in February 2026 and 1.9 million per day in March, before TikTok adopted its ban in April. 

Because of these demographics, the emotional texture of this craze is entirely different from the beauty industry's primarily female experience. And the difference mirrors how being cared for has historically been framed as weakness in men.

The beauty industry has spent years persuading women that appearance-related self-improvement is a form of self-care. A serum is not a punishment for aging, but rather a treat. From thinspiration to heroin chic, the pursuit of beauty is often sold to women as a luxury. Women pay to take toning exercise classes and drink juice cleanses, framed as self-care and self-empowerment, but often motivated by weight loss and the pursuit of youth. 

This is not the same tone as looksmaxxing forums, where a generation of isolated young men hate on themselves alone and without companionship. There is no feigned sense of pleasure, no fake warm glow, just brutal claims that they—and their faces—are coming up short. 

While vanity is often coded as feminine, the manosphere adopts a no-pain-no-gain mantra. 

Smashing yourself in the face with a hammer is many things, but girly is not one of them. This is the trend’s biggest lie: that suffering itself is proof of seriousness, that pain is discipline; the willingness to hurt yourself for the cause distinguishes the committed man from the weak one.

What looksmaxxing really reveals is not a failure of individual young men, but a failure of everything around them. Deep reservoirs of disconnection, the collapse of meaningful community, the gutting of third spaces, the absence of anywhere to simply be—these have been filled by forums and feeds that promise belonging while delivering competition. 

Those online spaces have become recruitment grounds for grievance where boys are told that male worth is measured in appearance and sexual success, that feminism has destroyed their prospects, and that the system is rigged against them. In the process, violence against themselves or others is often framed as a rational response to being overlooked.

When you strip away economic opportunity, gut third spaces, replace human connection with algorithmic feeds, and then tell young men their value is measured in their appearance and sexual success, the hammer is not a mystery. This is especially true for those who are desperate for something to smash against and can’t afford a surgeon. As a result, looksmaxxing becomes a harmful, but arguably logical, endpoint of a world that tells us our face determines our worth.

But we are all worthy of community. The tragedy here is that the human face evolved precisely for what looksmaxxing destroys: connection. 

The face is how we communicate without words, how we recognize one another, how we signal safety or threat, love, or indifference. It is the site of our vulnerability and our recognition of one another's vulnerability. In the moment of genuine eye contact—two faces meeting in mutual acknowledgment—we have an encounter that is meaningful and cannot be replicated by an algorithm or faked by a filter. 

Unfortunately, modern consumer culture has turned this instrument of connection into a competitive asset. We have judged people by their faces for centuries. Now, with an unprecedented range of goods and services and a form of media that visually reenacts age-old prejudices about looks, we have turned the face into a unit to be measured, honed, and rated. 

Instead of focusing on a face’s expressiveness, its capacity for empathy, or its uniqueness, we are fed algorithms with identikit features, racialized ideals, and a Botoxed passivity that is optimized to be gazed at rather than to communicate.

The face was never meant to be a commodity. It is a tool for connection—to connect our minds and our bodies and to connect us to each other. This truth is what we have forgotten—and what, for a generation of young men measuring their worth in ratios and ratings, has never been taught.