Looksmaxxing is the practice of ‘maxing out’ your appearance through a series of strategic interventions.
The idea, increasingly popular with a subset of online men, is to take what God has given you in the face department – and make it better.
You might think of looksmaxxing as the male equivalent of teenage girls trying on each other’s mascara or giving each other ‘glow-ups’ in the school loos – only the looksmaxxers have decided to give it a serious-sounding name, apply a dubious patina of evolutionary science and treat the whole business like a kind of real-life video game.
You can tell looksmaxxing is much more serious and masculine because – like the male chromosome – it has two xs. This is testosterone toner.
At its most wholesome, looksmaxxing is just a generation of young men discovering moisturiser – a little like the metrosexuals of yore. It might involve a better diet, good posture, a gym routine, some vitamin D and perhaps even some dental floss. So far, so sensible.
But, like all online phenomena, the closer you look, the deeper and darker it becomes. In the murkier corners of TikTok and Reddit, you will find charts ranking men by ‘facial harmony’ (eugenics have been making a surprise comeback in 2025) and tutorials on ‘mewing’ — a technique involving pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth to, allegedly, reshape your jawline over time.
There is talk of ‘hunter eyes’, ‘canthal tilt’, and ‘orbital recession’, all delivered with the reverence of medieval monks illuminating manuscripts – except the manuscripts are YouTube thumbnails with titles like BECOME A 10/10 CHAD IN SIX MONTHS (NO SURGERY!!)
Should you be of a YES SURGERY persuasion, you can take it further. ‘Hard looksmaxxing’ might involve nose jobs, jaw implants and, in extreme circumstances, limb-lengthening surgery – when you pay a surgeon £50,000 or so to break your thigh bones and pull the two bits of your legs apart in the hope you’ll grow four inches taller.
This really is a thing. ‘Life as a short man is hell. Life is better when you’re taller – trust me,’ said a young man I recently interviewed about the phenomenon. There have been articles about ‘bone-smashing’ too, which is when you take a hammer to your face in the hope your bones heal in a more aesthetically pleasing manner.
Undergirding all this is a more troubling philosophy. Life is really just a fleshy video game. As in any video game, you need to upgrade your hardware to win. The male body, thanks to social media and dating apps, is now subject to the sort of scrutiny females have lived with since time immemorial.
Still, not all of it is tragic. Much looksmaxxing advice boils down to: ‘Shower. Go to the gym. Stop playing Fortnite.’ Which, for a certain type of young man, may be life-changing advice. Richard Godwin
