Somewhere between a skincare routine and self-harm, a new standard of masculinity is forming online. In an era dominated by algorithms and image-driven platforms like TikTok, self-improvement has taken on a new form, “looksmaxing”, a trend that encourages men to optimize their physical appearance.
What started in the depths of incel forums as a response to perceived romantic failure, filled with misogyny, has now surfaced into the mainstream, transforming self-improvement into something calculated, competitive and, at times, extreme.
Clavicular…
As “looksmaxing” moved to mainstream social media, influencer and streamer Clavicular became the chisled face of the movement. 20-year-old Braden Peters (Clavicular) takes looks to an extreme, making them his priority and preaching his values to others.
But the beauty tips he’s sharing online mirror self-harm.
Clavicular has reported taking crystal meth to stay lean and since the age of 14 has injected a dozen controlled substances and altered is apperarnece in order to “ascend” (become more handsome). Clavicualr has helped form a community that prioritizes male attractiveness.
But most men’s “looksmaxing” isn’t as dramatic as Claviculars and can include “Softmaxing,” which refers to basic self-care practices like haircare, skincare, eating well, wearing light makeup, and tools like gua shas. “Hardmaxing,” however, pushes these efforts further, often into more extreme territory, such as excessive beta carotene intake to achieve a tan, the use of substances like GLP-1s or steroids, and even taking hair loss medication before any signs of balding appear. In some cases, men go as far as undergoing cosmetic surgery in pursuit of the “ideal” appearance.
The BBC has compared lookism rituals to those of Patrick Bateman from american psycho…
But doesn’t this sound familiar
The ideas behind looksmazing aren’t new; they have long shaped the way women and girls are taught to see themselves. For decades, similar industries and online spaces have reinforced the idea that appearance is something to constantly improve. Makeup, cosmetic procedures and even basic self-care have been normalized as expectations for women.
From magazines and film to music videos and now social media, women’s beauty standards have been consistently produced, circulared and internalized. The result is a culture where insecurity is common and cultivated.
What’s shifting now is who this pressure and reaching is and how it is being expressed. While girls have historically been taught to internalize their insecurities, boys are increasingly being encouraged to externalize and act on them. In looking spaces, insecurity becomes something to optimize, measure and compete over. Appearance is a form of status.
According to internal data from Meta, Instagram has worsened body image for one in three teenage girls. For years, similar large-scale impacts werent widley observed in boys, until now.
There is no finish line
Though self-improvement is not inherently bad, “Looksmaxing” can be dangerous because of what it demands of people. We have already seen the implications of appearance-based measuring. Years of impossible beauty standards have contributed to rising rates of body dysmorphia, eating disorders and depression among young women. Now, the same pressure is being repackaged and redirected toward men under a different aesthetic, but with a more extreme edge.
Online, boys are no longer just encouraged to “look better”; they are taught to dissect themselves. Their faces and bodies become measurements of angles, distances, ratios. And their bodies become something to optimize, all adding up to their self-worth.
Improvement is framed as “maximization”, leading to no clear or natural endpoint.
The line between self-care and destruction begins to blur. Skin care and gym routines can spiral into steroid use, dieting or even physical harm with a goal in mind that is often not real to begin with, emerging from filtered, edited or surgically altered content.
Clavicular has also popularized an even more alarming and harmful practice called “bone-smashing,” a trend in which individuals repeatedly hit their facial bones, thinking it will stimulate growth and create a more “chizled” structure. There’s no real scientific evidence to back this up, and it actually risks bruising, fractures and long-term damage.
These standards and practices are reinforced by algorithms, influencers and communities that reward transformation and ignore the cost. On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, content is not filtered by age in a meaningful way. A 13-year-old boy scrolling through fitness or self-improvement videos can quickly get sucked into toxic looksmaxing content, without realizing the danger.
At that age, insecurity is still forming, and identity is unstable. Instead of instilling confidence, young boys are being taught to evaluate themselves through hyper-specific, often pseudoscientific standards such as jaw angles, eye spacing, and body fat percentages. They are taught to control their appearance without giving themselves a chance to grow into it.
We know this has been damaging for young girls, but the difference is that boys are entering toxic beauty culture through the language of competition and optimization, with the potential to make harmful behaviours feel justified.
When ideas are introduced this early, they shape boys’ values towards themselves and others.
In addition, as these standards intensify for men, the mindset doesn’t stay internal, it extends outwards, turning others, especially women, into standards to be judged, compared, and controlled further.
If we have learned anything from the impact of beauty culture on women, it’s that when appearance becomes everything, it can take everything.
So what do we do with this
But the rise of “looksmaxing” can reveal something deeper. Young men, for the first time, are engaging with appearance, being vulnerable and expressing themselves in ways that may have once been dismissed as “unmasculine”. Underneath the layers of toxicity of some online spaces is a desire to feel confident, care for oneself and feel worthy.
This desire isn’t the problem; the framework it is placed in is.
Self-care does not need to mean self-critique, self-improvement does not need to come from insecurity, and confidence can come from within, without reaching a perfected version of yourself.
The conversation on looksmazing is an opportunity to redefine what self-improvement can look like, pushing it away from punishment and toward care.
Forming healthy habits, taking care of your skin, and maintaining your health and style can act as a form of self-respect, without a heavy focus on correction. It all just depends on intention.
We can still want to feel good in our own bodies, but we need to stop thinking of our bodies as problems to be fixed.