Before a girl learns to spell her own name or tie her shoes, she learns to read beauty. Sitting cross-legged in front of Disney FastPlay, I found myself horrified by the Evil Queen’s crooked appearance in “Snow White” and humored by Ursula’s body that seemed to fill every frame. Through sitcoms and cartoons, I absorbed, without ever being told, that virtue is visible and ugliness a warning.
That belief became personal at age 13, when pimples sprouted along my brow and my orthodontist prescribed nighttime headgear that made me a brunette version of the dentist’s niece in “Finding Nemo.” It was also at 13 that I first encountered the term “looksmaxxing” on social media — a week after a boy in my grade called me the ugliest girl at my lunch table.
Looksmaxxing, which began in online 4chan forums obsessing over jawlines and “hunter eyes,” has escaped containment. On TikTok and Instagram, it now arrives as routine self-improvement content: teenage boys “mew” for stronger chins, ice their faces for sharper cheekbones and “bonesmash” with a hammer to chisel their faces. What began as an effort to attract “foids” — incel slang for women — has evolved into a competition for physical superiority: to “ascend” and achieve “Chad,” alpha male status à la Henry Cavill or Patrick Bateman.
No one embodies looksmaxxing better than its patron saint: 20-year-old Brendan Peters, known online as Clavicular. From using meth as an appetite suppressant to being expelled from college for steroid use — and later hospitalized after an overdose — Clav rose to notoriety for pushing his obsession with appearance to a grotesque extreme.
In a conversation with political commentator Michael Knowles, Clav, despite being a far-right influencer, admitted he’d vote for California Governor Gavin Newsom over Vice President J.D. Vance. His reasoning had nothing to do with policy. Newsom, at 6’3”, simply “mogs” Vance — internet slang for physically outclassing someone — whom he dismisses as “subhuman.”
Through Clav and his entourage of looksmaxxers, looksmaxxing has evolved into a genre of content as much as an ideology. Devotees “starve-maxx” to appear gaunt, “sleep-maxx” to reduce eye bags and “finance-maxx” to afford cosmetic procedures. Beneath its macho branding, however, looksmaxxing does little more than repackage trends long-present in female-dominated spaces to fit the manosphere.
From applying face creams with a comb in a Hailey Bieber way to hyper-niche categorizations like “fox” and “bunny” pretty, short-form content exposes teenage girls to an endless taxonomy of their own appearance. Yet only when these behaviors migrate to boys do they become a cultural crisis and make headlines.
For teenage girls, Tumblr eating disorder culture has resurfaced, culminating in the final boss of glow-up trends: Wonyoungism, named after the extremely popular, extremely slender K-pop idol Jang Wonyoung. The subculture draws insecure teenage girls in through romanticized thinness — meals pared down to toddler-sized servings of cucumbers and rice cakes — in the pursuit of a body that, like the Chad male archetype, was never quite achievable.
Still, looksmaxxing has a particular chokehold on boys because it presents insecurity as productive. The goal is to approximate a specific kind of man: tall, muscular, sharply defined — Alexander the Great, with a TikTok beauty filter. In a cultural moment where masculinity feels both heavily criticized and poorly defined, looksmaxxing offers a clear, albeit shallow, rubric.
Looksmaxxers also perpetuate the “male loneliness epidemic,” or the declining relationships and deepening emotional isolation among young men — roughly 15% of whom reported having no friends in 2021. In that isolation, frustration rarely stays contained. Other men become competitors to be “mogged,” ranked by height and status rather than understood as peers. Women, in turn, become gatekeepers of sex, accessed only when men achieve the “right” body.
This logic, it turns out, is not new. Before it had a name or a subreddit attached to it, looksmaxxing was already in the background of childhood media — in the Evil Queen’s ugliness symbolizing moral decay, in using Ursula’s body as a punchline. Looksmaxxing may be branded as a crisis of modern masculinity, but its recent surge in popularity feels more like an extension of a beauty logic that girls have long been expected to internalize. The algorithm did not invent insecurity. It simply found a new audience.
