Men Have Discovered Skincare. But Looksmaxxing Is Taking Male Beauty Culture to a Dangerous Extreme

Men Have Discovered Skincare

Gone are the days when men woke up, and if their coworkers or loved one were lucky, brushed their teeth and put on fresh clothes. And for those who couldn’t win in the looks department, they learnt to impress with their art or writing.

Few years ago, my Korean coworker told me that having body hair was taboo for both men and women, and that men had the same kind of beauty standards as women in Korea. I also noticed in the past decade that there has been a rise in beauty saloons for men, where once there were basic barbers. Men have been going to gyms for as long as we know it, but it is nice to see them taking their skincare seriously, a market now worth nearly $20 billion globally and growing steadily as more men embrace sunscreen, moisturizers, and targeted products.

But, what I’m terrified of is the looksmaxxing trend, where people are optimizing extremely on their looks, that doesn’t seem to go away. Just a couple of years ago, I was only tracking the trends on eating disorders that were heightening among social media users. Now, looksmaxxing has become the norm. The key for Looksmaxxers is to become as handsome as possible by extreme measures like self-mutilation, injections, surgeries, and substance abuse.

The PSL scale that the male looksmaxxing community has built rates men on a scale of 1 to 8 where 1 is subhuman and Giga Chad or Tera Chad are considered godly. There are influencers like Shreyansh who eats only 1200 calories a day and walks in excess of 40000 steps somedays to not gain weight.

The Rich Face

I know some women who spend an average of $3000 on fake lashes a year. They want to play pickle ball and also want to look fabulous while playing it. I get it, you’ve got the means to do it and you want to look good in your midlife.

There was a time when there was only Kim Kardashian who looked like Kim Kardashian. And then slowly everyone saw the attention she was getting, and getting their faces lifted, butts and boobs enhanced and so the trend started of the “rich face”.

Amy Odell, a writer for the New York Times describes it like this. “A rich face is stretched taut, often incapable of varied expressions and plumped with filler or implants or a person’s own grafted fat. Once, this face belonged to a villainous class of elites in sci-fi depictions of a dystopian future.”

And now everyone has started to look like Jeff Bezos’ wife, Lauren Sánchez. As I walked around Blue Ridge, a small mountain town in Georgia, this past month, I saw two different women, don’t ask me if they were regular or rich ones, but they had that “rich face”.

In her essay on the Rich Face, Amy Odell says, “Status signaling used to be the purview of the $18,000 cocktail dress or the $50,000 designer bag. Now, the small number of Very Important Clients who account for 40 percent of luxury sales seem to be shifting more of their highly desired dollars to their faces. Today’s cleverly marketed aesthetic treatments include “global facial micro-optimization,” which involves numerous procedures to tweak everything from eye tilt to the way light reflects off the jaw, and costs between $150,000 and $300,000. There are also “forever 35,” “Diamond mini” and “weekend” face-lifts. Plastic surgeons in Washington are navigating a surge in requests for “Mar-a-Lago face.”

Collarbones And Jawlines Max Pro

“The face is a project to be optimized.” is what “looks-maxxer” Clavicular, who calls himself after the span of his collarbones, says. At 14, during Covid lockdown, he started experimenting with his looks as he became obsessed with online looksmaxxing forums. He documented his transformation and his virality built him an audience TikTok and Twitch.

He reportedly earns over $100K/month for his paid program subscriptions. His actual goal is make himself so attractive to women that everyone else around him will be ignored. There’s a word for that, mogging. Its derived from the acronym “AMOG”, denoting the Alpha male of a group.

Clavicular smokes crystal meth to suppress his appetite. He hits his face with a hammer. He injects DIY fat dissolvers near his facial nerve. He was arrested recently by the Fort Lauderdale police after he seemed to shoot a dead alligator in the Everglades national park.

Clavicular Arrest Warrant

A Theory of Relativity

I understand beauty can be a subjective thing. Ask any child who they think is the most beautiful woman is and they will tell us that its their mom. So attaching objectivity to such a relative concept is not possible even though with social media, we seemed to agree most times with our shared sense of ugliness especially when it comes to trolling or attacking people online for their looks.

The problem is for those of us, when no matter what we do, apply makeup or anything have a facial structure so severe that we can’t fall under society’s beauty standards. Social media algorithms and amplification are reinforcing our innate societal preferences. These are becoming our beauty standards and desirability our newest measure of happiness. Of course, the onus is not just on the individual but the society at large who treats attractive people differently.

And what if I marry someone who’s a 10 in terms of looks and beats the shit out of me every night, what’s the point of physical appearance when the personality is deeply flawed?

A Final Thought Exercise

The problem is bigger than Clavicular cannot be your child’s role model. Yes, people like him are outliers. But, the problem is whether your child searched for it or not, the social media algorithm is pushing this type of content to your boys. Boys who are watching content most of the times without any adult supervision.

And for adults, we must look into why men are also feeling the pressure to keep up with appearances like women have been subjected to traditionally. We must confront the underlying problem of why we are not feeling good enough with who we naturally are.

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If you or someone you know needs help — SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357 (free, confidential, 24/7).

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