Mental health professionals warn that looksmaxxing can cause harm for teens and others who get swept up in this toxic beauty standard trend.

By Richard Van

Looksmaxxing is its own community of toxic beauty standards, primarily for men, that started in the early 2010s. Before becoming mainstream, looksmaxxing mostly existed in online web forums. The term exploded into the mainstream around the 2020s when the first looksmaxxing social media influencers like Dillon Latham and later Braden Peters, known as Clavicular, appeared.

At first, influencers like Latham focused on grooming and self-improvement, until creators like Clavicular started saying on TikTok that the negative effects of consuming meth was an appropriate trade-off for being less hungry. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports meth can cause “serious negative health effects” such as anxiety, rapid heart rate and stroke and has “high potential to become addictive.”

Influencers and looksmaxxers also started to use body fat percentage and mathematical facial ratios to measure beauty in numbers. These beauty standards became competitive, and a new verb called “mogging” was invented, which meant to look better than another person.

Local mental health professionals warn that looksmaxxing can cause harm for teens and others who get swept up in the trend.

“Looksmaxxing is dangerous because it increases the likelihood of developing eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and low self-worth due to very intense self-criticism,” says Charles Starkman, assistant director of Counseling and Psychological Services at University of Michigan. “Depression, feelings of worthlessness, and suicidal thoughts can occur, too — it's a very serious issue.”

So why are creators like Clavicular telling men to starve themselves, and how are beauty standards that have always affected women, now also targeting men?

What is Looksmaxxing?

A photo illustration of teenagers watching Clavicular content on YouTube. Credit: Richard Van

Akshat Rai, a 16-year-old aspiring self-improvement influencer who attends International Academy East in Troy, said looksmaxxing can refer to a lot of things, like niche and toxic online communities, but also their more mainstream and milder counterparts dominated by influencers like Dillon Latham and Clavicular. “This term is so vague nowadays,” Rai said.

Rai said that while Clavicular is attractive and “he made it,” he took drugs and pursued other extreme methods to improve his looks, which isn't worth it. He added Clavicular has gone to extreme measures, and influencers “will do anything to look good.”

Why Men Looksmax

Looksmaxxing is a spectrum, so depending on where someone is on the spectrum, they can looksmax for different reasons.

Rai said people in our world are judgemental, and, whether or not you want to accept it, our world judges. “I feel like people … (are) vulnerable and they want to be better,” Rai said.

Charlie Sosnick, a 28 year-old freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York who covers topics like male subcultures, shared a similar view to Rai, suggesting that looking good comes with advantages in dating and making friends.

“I think the brutal fact of life is that looksmaxxers are maybe a tiny bit right in certain things. There's a lot of advantages to being good looking,” Sosnick said.

However, looksmaxxing can also be a deeply-rooted insecurity over a person’s physical appearance.

Being young comes with a swath of hardships. You have to learn how to navigate high school, puberty and dating for the first time. Looksmaxxing offers a way out of all those hardships, and that can be alluring to young men, Sosnick said.

“Looksmaxxing suggests an extremely brutal but simple solution, which says that the reason you don't feel confident when you walk into a room, and the reason you're struggling to talk to girls, is because you don't look good enough,” he said.

Margaret Ferguson, a former hairstylist and founder of the cosmetology union Beyond the Chair Co., said appearance insecurities were also a result of constantly seeing ourselves and others online in the months of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We were online constantly,” Ferguson said. “We’re in constant tension with our appearance and seeing ourselves reflected back to us.”

Ferguson’s claims are backed by the number of plastic surgeries performed in the U.S. at the time. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported a 37% increase in tummy tuck procedures and 23% increase in liposuction procedures from 2019 to 2022.

Rai agreed social media plays a role in how we perceive ourselves.

“Back in the day, I don't think looksmaxxing was a big thing, because social media has been a boom recently in these years and this generation,” Rai said.

Sosnick said a few more factors were involved, including puberty, dating and difficulties in making friends. He said teenage men face challenges that aren't easy for anyone. They're staring at themselves in their phone cameras that don’t produce an accurate image of themselves, sometimes for several hours a day, coupled with the fact they're going through puberty and looking slightly different everyday, he pointed out. All those hardships “can genuinely have a destabilizing effect that boys aren't prepared for,” Sosnick said.

A 2022 C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital national poll found a majority of adolescents and teens are self-conscious about their appearance.

"As kids get older, they become more self-aware, are more likely to compare themselves to peers and may be more influenced by media portrayals about beauty and the most desirable body shape, face and look," poll co-director and University of Michigan Health pediatrician Susan Woolford said in a Michigan Medicine article.

"It's developmentally normal for adolescents and teens to experience some insecurities, but if it's interfering with their ability to enjoy social interactions or other activities, they may need help."

What Makes Looksmaxxing Different from Generic Beauty Standards?

Charlie Sosnick, a writer who covers internet subcultures.

The toxic beauty standards found in looksmaxxing communities are very different from generic men’s beauty standards. These communities have come up with rigid and mathematical formulas to calculate your attractiveness, Sosnick said.

Before looksmaxxing became mainstream, Sosnick said it also used to be intensely intertwined with incel culture. (Incel culture is an internet subculture where violent and misogynistic discourse takes place. It is an abbreviation of “involuntarily celibate.”) He explained looksmaxxing came with an intense structure and codified rules, which separated it from mainstream beauty standards. For instance, there’s the PSL scale, a rating system popularized on TikTok which uses mathematical ratios to calculate someone’s attractiveness.

“You have the PSL scale, and you have these very in-depth guides on the forums, where people are laying out exact ratios for every single thing on your face. That I don't know if it quite exists for just generic women's beauty standards,” Sosnick said.

These misogynistic ideas appeared in online looksmaxxing communities known as the manosphere. “Looksmaxxing is really deeply attached to hardcore, misogynistic, I would call it misanthropic, communities on the internet,” Sosnick said.

Ferguson added, “You started getting like this bro-pedagogy, this bro teaching what manhood is, what you need to look like, and things like that to where it created a brand new type of beauty norm for young men.”

Defying the Trend and Being Ourselves

While we all want to look good, and we all enjoy the feeling of looking good to others, Ferguson suggested that “the biggest thing to overcome is external validation, where we're constantly seeking others' approval.”

As tensions with our own appearances build and social media becomes more prevalent, Rai encouraged teenagers to overcome toxic beauty standards by having confidence in their identities, and not caring what others think. When Rai painted his nails at the start of sophomore year, his friends “clowned” him, asking if he was gay or asking if he was a girl. He said, “I didn’t really care. I mean, like, I’m doing myself.”

Resources:

If you’re struggling with your body image, talk to your primary care doctor or a mental health professional. The Mayo Clinic notes these professionals can offer kids and teens tools to “counter social pressure and feel good about their body image.”

For teens who may be affected by looksmaxxing, check out the mental health resource Young Minds.