In 2025, glow-up culture isn’t reserved for the girls. It has its own masc iteration: looksmaxxing, a subsect of the manosphere that sees men undergo a host of proven and pseudo-scientific aesthetic procedures in an attempt to improve their looks.
The prime looksmaxxer aesthetic includes chiselled jaws, ripped bodies, bone-structure-defining facial hair, a large, strong chin, full lips, high cheekbones, and “hunter” eyes. The looksmaxxers poster boys are Jordan Barrett, Francisco Lachowski, and Patrick Bateman, and their key influencers include Kareen Shami (@syrianpsycho) and Austin Wayne.
The methods used to achieve this face vary between healthy—or at least relatively harmless—lifestyle changes, (known as softmaxxing) and extreme interventions that can wreak permanent havoc on the body (known as hardmaxxing). They include supplements, dieting, gym time (a lot of looksmaxxers double as gym bros), mewing (placing your tongue on the top of your mouth in an attempt to define the jawline), plastic surgery, and jaw smashing—whereby looksmaxxers smash their jaws hoping the bones will grow back more defined.
Looksmaxxing has been around for over a decade, finding a platform for itself on Reddit threads and other internet forums where men offer each other tips on how to optimize their looks. Obviously, getting others to weigh in on your looks can be thorny, so the looksmaxxing communities are often rife with criticism that borders on bullying. And considering its target audience—men who feel too ugly to ‘get’ women—and its philosophy—that the more masc you are the better—it's unsurprising that the looksmaxxing X incel Venn diagram has a hefty crossover, with a lot of incels using looksmaxxing techniques with the end goal of increasing their ‘sexual market value.’
But over the past few years, looksmaxxing content has seeped into mainstream social media outlets like TikTok (a reportby researchers at University College London and the University of Kent found that TikTok algorithms amplify misogynistic content) ensnaring a whole new demographic of young men who didn’t necessarily go looking for such content, and watering their insecurities in the process: looksmaxxing encourages social media to analyze niche facial characteristics and measurements that we wouldn’t usually think about, like “a positive canthal tilt” (eyes angled slightly downwards towards the nose) and interpupillary distance, resulting in appearance osmosis: aka a world where we all aspire to the same aesthetic ideal.
It’s just another iteration of obsession with self-optimization, and optimizing our dating pool in a dating app era. Unfortunately, as it idealizes traditional (toxic af) masculinity, it’s also deepening existing gender divides. As always: capitalism is profiting from our insecurities, and this time men are its market.
