The dark truth about ‘looksmaxxing’

When I first read about “looksmaxxing”, the male project of improving one’s physical appearance through whatever means necessary, I understood, suddenly, how the original feminists must have felt. I could imagine exactly what it was like to be the first person to have squinted their eyes at the creative, grim and violent efforts women were making to beautify themselves and go, quietly, hmmm.

Looksmaxxing communities are where young men share tips about injecting testosterone to inflate their muscles, “bonesmashing” their faces with knuckles, bottles or hammers, and smoking crystal meth to stay thin. There’s soft-maxxing, which involves hair and skincare, and hard-maxxing, which includes cosmetic surgery, both professional and DIY, and there is a ratings system, and there is much hatred of women. There is a whole thriving subculture here, with its own evolving language and politics. In a recent interview, looksmaxxing influencer Braden Peters said that while on the whole he agrees with JD Vance’s views (the community tends to situate itself somewhere between far right Maga and bedroom nihilism), he’d vote for “degenerate” democrat Gavin Newsom as president as he thinks he’s better looking – Newsom “mogs” Vance, because he’s a “Chad” and Vance is “subhuman”. He’s “got a very short total facial width-to-height ratio, he’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like a 6ft 3in Chad.” You see?

The beauty industry has only recently started to focus seriously on men, but its focus has been sharp – Vogue reports that male beauty and grooming sales surged 77% year-on-year in the UK, with the global men’s health and wellness market forecast expected to reach $2.57 trillion by 2029. One key difference between women’s beauty culture (handed down to us in infancy through dolls and lip balm and compliments shared) and men’s beauty culture, which is still emerging, is that with the looksmaxxing subsect their politics are displayed upfront, right at the point of sale. There is a thick, viscous kind of honesty here, the kind I always reluctantly appreciate, even as I lean over to doublelock the door – no nonsense, no nuance, very little subtext: a person’s worth is directly tied to their appearance. That’s it. Women’s beauty culture, of course, relies on exactly the same lie – your goodness, your success, your value as a woman depends on how you look and the lengths you’re willing to go to get there – but it deliberately obscures that lie using increasingly sophisticated methods and a language all of its own.

While it can be confusing for women to unpick the beauty lessons that have been repeated to us since childhood and formed the brittle adults we grew into, and frightening even, to confront an industry that actively fights attempts to reckon with it, I find that tuning into the looksmaxxing men allows a certain clarity. The bluntness of their mission – pain is beauty, beauty is supremacy – invites the rest of us to poke at our own ideas and boundaries about aesthetics and self-care.

Sure, smashing your jaw with a hammer in pursuit of symmetry or splendour might seem unnecessarily violent and insane, but where does it sit on a scale that also includes inserting a needle into your lip and injecting it with filler (a procedure that half the respondents to a 2019 survey described as so routine it’s “comparable to getting a haircut”) or microneedling, or a bikini wax? And yes, by promoting ageist, sexist, oppressive ideals these looksmaxxing guys seem to be at best mired in a deep moral crisis, and at worst a danger to themselves and others, but – what does that knowledge tell us about our own daily attempts to appear younger, or more feminine, or wealthy, or simply acceptable?

If we can identify the points at which we become disturbed by how (as a recent study named Health, Lookism and Self‐Improvement in the Manosphere concluded) the looksmaxxing community “buttresses hegemonic masculinity and male supremacy while harming the health of men and boys who participate”, then it becomes easier, I think, to see how the communities and industries around our own quotidian beauty routines affect the health of women. Where, I wonder, does the madness kick in? Is it when you start moralising about beauty, or attempting to chop away at the various curses of genetics? Is it when you introduce a hammer, or a knife, or a needle?

Paragraph by Igor Mojzes