When scrolling through my brother’s Instagram feed, I understood looksmaxxing to be a self-improvement culture for teenage boys, but behind the low taper fades and jawline poses lies a culture far more complicated (and concerning) than it first appears.
Bracing myself for the many wonders of the boy-cave, I infiltrated my brother’s room. I was on a social media detox, but I was craving a small hit of dopamine. I slipped his phone off the desk, yanked the dirty clothes off the chair, and got myself comfortable on his grimy couch. Upon opening his Instagram, I was appalled. The first reel showed a group of beefy, shirtless men flexing in a dimly lit gym mirror. Swipe. A chud with a forced double chin, funky drawn-on unibrow, and thick-rimmed glasses sitting awkwardly in a barber’s chair transforms into the quintessential mogger: a fresh low taper fade, sleek eyebrows, and a newfound sense of confidence. By the next three swipes, I’ve witnessed multiple versions of boys who look like they are about to suffocate from flexing their sharp jawline.
My brain was begging me to stop. As I looked up at my brother to return his phone, a thought snapped into place. My brother had some eerily similar habits to the ones in the videos I just watched—the poses he’s hitting to flex his muscles in my mirror, the constipated face he makes, the haircuts he’s gotten (but without the upgraded jawline). I still see the same younger brother in him, but
I feel a discord between the brother I know and the person he is trying to become.
When I asked my brother about his feed, he explained the whole genre as looksmaxxing, where boys try to maximize their physical attractiveness through self-improvement. It started as a niche online subculture. Now, it has become a mainstream trend, even at our school, where the hallways smell like a concoction of musky cologne and the stench of unshampooed hair to reach peak fluffiness.
These boys aren’t creating these standards by themselves. Instead, they’re warped into the looksmaxxing lair. Influencers, such as Clavicular, package their nonsensical advice into videos on their social media platforms, and then the cycle begins: the video goes viral. Suddenly, everyone wants the same bleached buzzcut, the same mewing method, and the same nonchalant vocabulary. Originally, people followed trends based on their interests, but now boys start to feel trends are necessary to fit in.
That constant pressure of trying to achieve the best version of yourself can become a pathological obsession with reaching the next tier of attractiveness. Instead of just mimicking social media influencers' styles, boys may begin taking dangerous and unproven online methods as legitimate advice. Some even submit photos of themselves on platforms like Reddit to rate their looks with the PSL scale, getting complete strangers to reduce their appearance to a score. This creates a feedback loop where insecurity creates more online searching, online searching creates more comparison, and more comparison makes you feel even more insecure.
Eventually, looksmaxxing becomes a norm in friend groups, where a PSL scale is casually tossed around along with other terms, BP and IPD, like a second language. This vocabulary makes the process of judging people sound technical, measuring peculiar factors such as the recession of a maxilla and the canthal tilt of someone’s eyes, which makes attractiveness sound less of an opinion and more like an objective fact.
That same mindset can make attractiveness feel more important than character. Despite the controversy surrounding looksmaxxing influencer Hullo, there are still comments under his TikTok account, with users calling him “my king” or “my god”, saying they love him, and demanding that he should be “freed” of his conviction.
Since when did sucking in your cheeks for a video make up for a jail sentence?
These followers treated his appearance-based status as enough reason to keep defending him. With this ongoing culture, pretty privilege is placed on a pedestal, making actions seem excusable to cult-like followers. Despite the circumstances, I hope teen boys who are pursuing looksmaxxing realize that attractiveness does not excuse wrongdoings, and that if those are their intentions for self-improvement, then they are building their goals on the wrong foundation entirely.
I saw what that normalization looked like at school when boys used the PSL scale to rank girls in their grade. They treated it like a harmless joke, placing girls into extreme categories. But reducing girls to numbers made it easier to forget that they were judging real people. Once those rankings were leaked to the student body, the scale became something girls had to awkwardly confront at school: the realization that they had been objectified, measured, compared, and discussed without their permission.
Looksmaxxing, disguised as a self-improvement culture, does more than teach ever-changing teenagers that fitting in requires checking off boxes to advance to the next imaginary tier. It turns physical appearance into a score to chase, encourages harmful shortcuts, reduces people to just their features, and gives superficial status to those who meet its standards. I believe that my brother—and other boys around his age—should be able to care about their appearance without letting looksmaxxing decide how they see or treat people around them.
