Young men in bathrooms and bedrooms fix themselves on a scale via social media communities. Then, they agonize over their appearance and devise “soft” and “hard” ways to improve it. Welcome to the era of “looksmaxxing, ” which has taken over the manosphere and is creating a new aesthetic vocabulary in the process. Underpinning it is a purportedly “objective” scale of attractiveness, based on such traits as “facial harmony,” balance, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism, to rank people on a scale from zero to eight, with eight being the highest (aka, in looksmaxing parlance, a “Giga Chad”) and zero the lowest (or what the phenomenon terms “subhuman.”) It doesn’t stop there; there are subcategories. Soft looksmaxxing involves skincare and grooming, fitness, and diet. There are specific techniques, such as “mewing”—pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth—that are supposed to enhance your jawline, as well as eyelid pulling in pursuit of “hunter eyes.” Some even embrace “starvemaxxing” (not eating) to make the face thinner. Then there is hard looksmaxxing, which is more extreme: fillers and injectables to define the jaw or lips, rhinoplasty, chin implants, hair transplants, and unapproved chemicals for muscle growth. And, finally, there is “bonesmashing,” which involves young men striking their own faces with hammers based on the 19th-century theory that repeated blunt trauma will cause the facial bones to heal back harder, more angular, more masculine. It doesn’t work—but it can cause swelling, microfractures, nerve damage, disfigurement, and even serious permanent injury. We don’t know how many boys do pick up…
Want more insights? Join Grow With Caliber - our career elevating newsletter and get our take on the future of work delivered weekly.
