How looksmaxxing went mainstream The incel trend has been adopted by teenagers

Let’s start with some facts. Trying to look your best is a normal, even admirable effort. Caring for your appearance is a sign that you respect not only yourself but those around you. A culture of young people interested in beauty is likely better than a culture of young people so uninvested in themselves and their futures that they have no concern with aesthetics at all.

But there are limits, ones that are now being stretched to the point of deterioration by the phenomenon of “looksmaxxing”. Referring to a broad category of practices aimed towards maximising your attractiveness, looksmaxxing follows the same ideology of “optimisation”, where every facet is quantifiable. Attractiveness, in this reading, is not subjective, but rather dictated by millimetres of bone and degrees of “canthal tilt” (another term for eye angle placement). And increasingly, this obsession with surgical levels of improvement is creeping into the vocabularies of teenagers.

What’s curious is that this is happening at a time when beauty standards are allegedly becoming more flexible than ever. Most young women, after all, have been raised in a culture that claims to embrace all bodies and faces. No longer, as many Dove campaigns seem to say, do girls need to starve themselves to a perpetual size 0. Have acne? Throw a convenient star-shaped patch over it and head off to school. Crooked teeth might even get you a modelling contract.

Of course, the reality isn’t quite that wholesome and carefree. Sure, braces might not get you bullied anymore, but social media has allowed us to find flaws we hadn’t known existed. Meanwhile, the pool of people to compare ourselves with is no longer confined to those within our immediate community or those exceptional enough to be seen on TV. Rather, thanks to social media, we are exposed to an endless array of individuals, attractive or otherwise, and have been given a new language to label and scrutinise not only them, but ourselves.

Yet over the past decade, such discourse has been marked by a glaring absence: men. Although periodically a trend like “dad bods” might come along, brands rarely champion for widened acceptance towards their aesthetic pressures. It’s into this vacuum that looksmaxxing first took form.

As KnowYourMeme explains, the term emerged in 2015 on forums like 4Chan and Reddit among incel and manosphere-adjacent groups desperate to improve their social and romantic standing. The term soon creeped into other corners of Reddit in the early 2020s with subreddits such as r/TrueRateMe, where users share pictures of themselves seeking honest opinions on their appearance. During this time, Reddit itself became increasingly mainstream: between 2018 and 2024, its monthly active users jumped from 331 million to an estimated 1.2 billion.

Meanwhile, TikTok also proliferated, presenting not only an addictive feed of comparison but a new platform for looksmaxxing and its philosophy to grow. Here, we’re shown unlimited hours of beautiful people paired with detailed explanations of why they’re beautiful, and, of more importance, why exactly we don’t look like them. Your jawline isn’t square enough. Your cheekbones aren’t prominent enough. Your nose is too wide. Your skin is too dull. Your lips are too thin. Your face is just asymmetrical enough that, whenever people gaze upon it, they will not see a worthy mate. And crucially, all of this can be quantified with precise traits and measures.

While looksmaxxing is practised by plenty of young women (one could argue women have long been participating, just not under that precise term), it is most rigidly pursued among young men. For women, our options may be more expansive: not only are the majority of skin and haircare products marketed towards us, but makeup offers us a culturally acceptable form of day-to-day improvement.

Absent of these same opportunities, it seems that men have applied looksmaxxing with more of a stringent, pseudo-scientific approach. In one TikTok from January, for example, an anonymous creator rates the attractiveness of influencer SyrianPsycho, a fellow looksmaxxing TikToker with 1.7 million followers. “Syrian has equal facial thirds, almond hunter green eyes with low set, thick and positively tilted eyebrows. He has excellent jawline visibility… he has a good nose shape and good chin projection. Syrian’s main flaws are on the jaw region, his lower jaw is slightly recessed and his gonial angle is on the higher side. He has a narrower than ideal lower third. His midface is on the longer side. Syrian is a 7.5 out of 10 facially.”

The video is filled with comments from fellow young men saying that if SyrianPsycho only scores a 7.5, then it’s “over” for them in comparison.

But through looksmaxxing, of course, any of this has the potential to be fixed. A person can “softmaxx” by getting a more flattering haircut, losing weight through diet and exercise, or improve their skincare routine. If this isn’t enough, they can “hardmaxx” instead — add filler to their lips, have the bones in their face shaven down, undergo excruciating surgery and months of recovery in order to become three inches taller. Through the help of men such as SyrianPsycho, who sell online courses on looksmaxxing and “self-improvement”, they, too, can be attractive.

It is possible, though, that as the language of looksmaxxing — and inceldom — enters the dominant lexicon, it becomes defanged. Searches for looksmaxxing topics on TikTok yield a blend of advice, criticism and jokes. While some young people continue to look towards looksmaxxing creators for insight into how to improve their perceived flaws, others have transformed it into a meme. Now, ironic references to canthal tilt likely outnumber earnest ones. For some, though, the jokes are a means of coping: “Eyebags detected, time to ropemaxx,” one TikTok with just under 1 million views reads, alluding to hanging oneself.

Ironic or otherwise, the damage may still be occurring. With guys like SyrianPsycho naming their courses “Mogwarts” — a reference to “mogging”, or being significantly more attractive than somebody — parsing what’s genuine becomes a challenge. As this all trickles down to younger audiences and becomes filtered through even more layers of memes and internet references, perhaps the true threat any of this presents has become niche. “Mewing”, for example, which refers to the practice of attempting to enhance one’s jawline through various facial exercises and tongue placement, has become a joke even in elementary schools. Among kids, mewing has become associated with a specific gesture and facial expression of pursing their lips, putting a finger up in a “shhh” symbol and then pointing to their jaws. Last week, Parents.com wrote that mewing has “taken over classrooms”, with many teachers lamenting how “disrespectful” the trend is.

Of course, every generation has had their childhood jokes that adults just didn’t understand. I was eight, going on nine, when Napoleon Dynamite was released and “Tina, you fat lard, come get some dinner” entered my lexicon. I remember my mother being appalled by how my friends and I would repeat the line. But we didn’t even understand it. The Tina, who was described as a “fat lard”, was a llama in the film. We weren’t calling each other “fat lards”, but simply quoting the film of the summer.

I think of this now as my niece, 11, has begun making her own jokes about mewing. That she, a young girl who does not have her own mobile phone and isn’t even old enough to have an interest in makeup, would be aware of anything remotely associated with this phenomenon frightens me. Is she growing up in a culture with increasingly rigid beauty standards, despite all the talk of body positivity? Or is this just her generation’s set of Napoleon Dynamite-esque jokes?

Of course, the answer is probably somewhere in between. Was I not, even at that young age, already concerned with my body? And would I not have felt shame if I’d been something like a “fat lard” myself? After my niece showed me her rendition of the mewing meme last week, did she not stop to ask if her jawline needed improvement?

Be it through jokes or otherwise, the culture of looksmaxxing among young people reflects a broader anxiety towards beauty in an era where some would claim these standards to be flexible. It’s as if as some parameters have shifted, we’ve responded by drilling down with even more intensity on others. What good does body positivity do when everyone around you is assessing their faces with protractors?

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Magdalene J. Taylor is a New York City-based writer covering sex and culture.

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