Looksmaxxing Is Selling Young Men a Lie. Character Is What Actually Gets You Loved.

Somewhere right now, a teenage boy is pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth, convinced it will rebuild his jaw. Another is uploading a selfie to an app that will score his cheekbones, his “masculinity” and his skin out of 10. A few, egged on by strangers online, are tapping their own faces with hammers in the hope of cracking the bone into something sharper.

This is looksmaxxing, the online subculture that treats a young man’s face as a problem to be optimized. It has its own vocabulary: “softmaxxing” for haircuts and skin care, “hardmaxxing” for surgery, steroids and worse. It has its own heroes and its own grim math, in which a few millimeters of jawline decide whether you’ll ever be loved.

It is also, at its core, a sad response to a real problem, and it’s pointed in the wrong direction.

The damage

Doctors are sounding the alarm. Dr. Jasmine Reese, who directs the adolescent and young adult clinic at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, has described a “huge uptick” in teens, including pre-teens, with eating disorders and body dysmorphia. She warns that AI rating apps can make vulnerable kids feel worse and push them toward dangerous experiments. Influencers in the space push anabolic steroids, experimental peptides bought online and stimulants for weight loss.

Bone smashing, the practice of repeatedly striking the cheeks and jaw to cause tiny fractures, is “one of the most concerning practices in the looksmaxxing subculture,” according to UT Southwestern Medical Center. It can cause fat necrosis and permanent bone damage, leaving a disfigured face instead of a chiseled one, and kick off years of corrective procedures. Mewing, the tongue trick, has no solid scientific evidence behind it.

Underneath all of it is real pain. In 2023, 28% of male high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, up from 21% a decade earlier, according to CDC data. Up to 80% of adolescent boys report being unhappy with their bodies. Looksmaxxing didn’t create that loneliness. It just found a way to sell to it.

What people actually want

Here’s the cruel irony. The movement promises that looks are destiny in dating, and the research keeps saying otherwise.

In one of the largest studies of mate preferences ever done, psychologist David Buss surveyed more than 10,000 people across 37 cultures in the late 1980s. Men and women alike ranked being kind and understanding, and being intelligent, at or near the top of what they wanted in a partner, ahead of good looks.