Face Value: Why ‘Looksmaxxing’ Is More Than Mewing and Mirrors
'Looksmaxxing' is a growing online trend among young men who seek to improve their physical appearance through various methods, ranging from skincare to extreme and dangerous practices like 'bonesmashing.' Rooted in incel communities, the movement uses an 'objective' scale of attractiveness to rank individuals, promoting both cosmetic and harmful techniques. The phenomenon reflects broader societal pressures around facial perfection, exacerbated by social media and limited avenues for male identity and belonging.
- ▪Looksmaxxing categorizes attractiveness on a scale from zero to eight, with terms like 'Giga Chad' for the highest and 'subhuman' for the lowest.
- ▪Soft looksmaxxing includes grooming, fitness, and techniques like mewing, while hard looksmaxxing involves surgeries, fillers, and unapproved chemicals.
- ▪'Bonesmashing,' a dangerous practice involving facial trauma to alter bone structure, has gained significant attention on TikTok, prompting the platform to restrict related searches.
- ▪The trend originated in 2010s incel forums and spread to platforms like TikTok and Instagram, especially during the pandemic.
- ▪Both celebrities and everyday individuals operate under the belief that facial appearance determines human worth, reflecting a widespread cultural fixation.
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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.
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