A young man, around 18 or 19 years old, is chewing on a towel. He tilts his head towards the camera, points at his chiselled jawline and says that chomping on the folded bath mat every day for 30 seconds has fixed his insecurities.
Another, who’s flexing his abs under fluorescent bathroom lighting, is analysing his IPD (the interpupillary distance, or gap, between the eyes) and scoring his face for symmetry and harmony.
Next comes a teenage girl sharing her 17-step anti-ageing skincare routine, and a woman talking through her lower blepharoplasty (in which a surgeon sliced into her eyelid to remove excess fat) as if she’s chatting about the weather. Finally, a man with the complexion of a baby, or a soft and smoothing beauty filter, is beating his face with a hammer. “Ascend,” says the caption, signalling his upwards progression on a deliberate and dramatic glow-up.
If a human from the year 2016 were to find themselves catapulted 10 years into the future, they might mistake their social media feed for a satire or dark comedy, an episode of Black Mirror where attractiveness is optimised, quantified and sometimes weaponised. Instead, 2026 is pinch-me real and “looksmaxxing” – a trend, subculture and industry all rolled into one – is shaping modern beauty standards.
Once reserved for niche and dark corners of the internet, the precision-focused practice of “maxxing” your looks has trickled out into the mainstream, primarily targeting young men hoping to enhance their physical appearance.
The thinking behind the movement, though, is indicative of a more universal shift: if once upon a time you had to accept your wonky nose, short legs or visible pores as realities of genetics, now we’re told that with effort, discipline and intervention you can become the best-looking version of yourself. Or, according to the looksmaxxing discourse, you must become the best-looking version of yourself, or risk being deemed undesirable in a culture increasingly defined by aesthetics.
Cue a slew of online courses on “how to be hotter”, influencers who spruik supplements, steroids, weight-loss drugs and black-market peptides, and forums where you’ll glean tips on how to chew gum to increase masseter engagement and sculpt your lower face.
The pursuit of perfection is more public and pervasive than ever, even if perfection is ever elusive. Dean Robertson was an early looksmaxxer. He stumbled across the term on Reddit in 2018 when he “wasn’t in a great place physically. I couldn’t lift the bar at the gym, had red, patchy skin and was pretty much playing video games all day”, he remembers.
Buoyed by how grooming, skincare, a diet and gym regimen boosted his confidence, he founded Looksmaxxing.com the following year. Today, his forum has nearly 70,000 global members, largely men from their mid-teens to mid-twenties, who discuss topics such as “Raw colostrum, is it worth it?”; “Rate my glow-up. Do I need surgery?” and “How to reconstitute a peptide and make a nasal spray.”
Discussions traverse softmaxxing (daily self-care, such as fitness, skincare and protein-loading) and hardmaxxing (hair transplants, leg-lengthening surgery and extreme TikTok-driven trends such as bone smashing, where individuals strike their jaw or cheekbones with a hard object to stimulate bone growth and reshape their facial structure. Doctors warn it’s unscientific, unsafe and ineffective.)
“For most people, [getting into looksmaxxing] starts with a fairly simple realisation: that attractiveness isn’t fixed, and that there are concrete things you can do to improve how you look,” says Robertson. “That’s a surprisingly powerful idea for a lot of men, especially when mainstream advice tends to either ignore appearance entirely or be frustratingly vague about it.
There’s also well-documented research showing that physical appearance directly influences dating success, perceived competence, hiring decisions and earning potential.” In a survey last year, Looksmaxxing.com found that 87 per cent of its members experienced positive life changes by maximising their attractiveness, while 55 per cent experienced stress, anxiety and poor mental health as a result of the practice.
Nearly 60 per cent were under 18 years old, and about half are considering surgical procedures in the future. Most got into looksmaxxing to lift their self-confidence, but 45 per cent wouldn’t recommend it to others.
One person who wholeheartedly endorses looksmaxxing is Braden Peters, the 20-year-old US content creator better known as Clavicular, named for his “perfect” 50cm biacromial width or clavicle span. As figurehead of the subculture, he spouts a message that visual dominance equals status and superiority, spends his days “mogging” other men – essentially, being more physically attractive and casting them as inferior – and uses testosterone therapy and crystal meth to “lean max”.
In April, he was hospitalised after a suspected drug overdose, then an 18-year-old female looksmaxxer, Aleksandra Mendoza (aka Alorah Ziva), sued him for alleged fraud, battery and sexual assault, claiming he injected her face with a fat-melting drug during a livestream; he denies the allegations. Peters is said to rake in more than $100,000 a month from content, and runs an online looksmaxxing “academy” that’s been criticised for capitalising on male insecurity.
By encouraging obsessive behaviours and fuelling body dysmorphia, does looksmaxxing exacerbate the very problem it sets out to solve? “It’s a fair criticism to raise, and I think it applies to parts of the space, particularly the more sensationalised, influencer-driven side of it,” says Robertson.
“There are definitely people who are happy to monetise insecurity without offering anything of real value. My view is that the content itself isn’t the problem, it’s the intent and framing behind it … Done right, [looksmaxxing] is empowering, it gives people agency over something they previously felt helpless about, and the confidence that comes from that tends to spill over into other areas of life. Where it becomes a problem is when someone internalises the idea that their appearance is the ceiling of their worth. That’s not something we try to promote.”
There’s an elephant in the room, although she’s thinner and less wrinkly than your average. Because while the current conversation about dangerous beauty standards largely revolves around men, women have been engaging in forms of looksmaxxing for centuries.
Primping, preening, sculpting, smoothing, snatching. Today, in an era of relentless aesthetic innovation, women are running on a hot-girl hamster wheel, chasing a finish line that never quite exists. Visible ageing is no longer inevitable, cosmetic procedures once considered extreme, such as deep-plane facelifts, are the new normal, and widespread GLP-1 adoption for aesthetic weight loss, often loosely regulated, poses a major setback for body positivity.
Research from the Butterfly Foundation found more than 40 per cent of Australian teen girls are mostly or completely dissatisfied with their bodies. And yet it’s the male pursuit of beauty – which coincides with the omnipresence of social media, dating apps and Zoom meetings, and sees men facing the same kind of physical scrutiny and self-evaluation women have navigated for generations – that is being framed as a cultural crisis. This may be explained by the origins of looksmaxxing, which emerged in involuntary celibate (incel) forums and are still intertwined with misogynistic (as well as racist) language and assumptions.
“There is definitely some historical overlap, but the mindset today is fundamentally different,” argues Robertson. “Incel culture is rooted in fatalism, the belief that nothing can change and outcomes are genetically fixed. Looksmaxxing, as it’s practised more broadly now, is built around agency. You can’t change everything, but you can meaningfully improve aspects of your appearance.”
Men’s self-improvement, like women’s, is typically driven by the male gaze, but it’s more gamified, competitive and hyper-analytical, presenting a potential paradigm shift for aesthetics. “With the rise of AI and programs that analyse your face and tell you what needs to be done, I imagine I’ll have more clients in the next year saying, ‘This is what I’ve been told I need to do to be my most attractive self,’ ” predicts Dr Amy Chahal, Sydney cosmetic doctor and founder of The Centre for Medical Aesthetics as well as FutureSkin.
She notes that people already visit her clinics with edited or filtered reference images and request outcomes that aren’t anatomically achievable or sustainable.
“My biggest concern is that people are struggling to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.” Chahal notes that while extreme looksmaxxing content is capturing eyeballs and column inches, its real-world influence in Australia, in her clinics at least, appears limited.
On the contrary, she is observing a return to more natural-looking results in cosmetic work. Paradoxically, these outcomes may still require significant intervention, effort and upkeep. Even at the softest end of the spectrum, looksmaxxing invites broader questions about how much mental and temporal energy we’re investing into how we look, and the actual ROI? Does the pursuit of hotness align with the pursuit of happiness?
Which is more harmful: the wildly unattainable beauty standards of yesteryear, or the equally narrow but supposedly attainable beauty standards of today? And in the perpetual optimisation loop, will the work-in-progress ever be complete? “We’re biologically and evolutionarily programmed to want to put our best face forward and be as presentable as we possibly can be,” points out Chahal. “But, as a species, we’re meant to be unique.”
We weren’t designed to all have the same algorithmically engineered face – the same iron-cut jawline and precision-aligned eyes, with genetic ‘imperfections’ ultimately phased out. It’s a dystopian future that doesn’t feel entirely outlandish on this trajectory.
“Even in terms of attractiveness, what one person finds attractive is not the same as another,” continues Chahal. “So, in the current landscape, I think it’s about becoming comfortable in your own skin, looking after yourself, and keeping and enhancing your own unique beauty. And not trying to be like anyone else. Especially when it’s not even reality.”
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