The Men Optimizing Their Faces — And Judging Yours

Brooklyn, a 21-year-old college student from South Carolina, was swiping through Tinder last December when she spotted a cute guy with an angular face, tattoos, and an alternative style that mirrored her own. They matched. But as she perused his social media, she noticed something alarming. It was full of diagrams relating to optimal skull shape scattered with joyless selfies and fitness content.

It wasn’t until they started chatting that she realized just how deeply entrenched he was in looksmaxxing, a term coined by men attempting to alter their appearance through any means necessary to achieve what they consider a masculine ideal: strong facial features, a thick neck, blue eyes, tanned skin, and visible muscles on a lean frame, ideally one that’s under 15% body fat.

Beyond the concerning posts, their conversations left her uneasy. He told her his only goals were to be as handsome and rich as possible, stressing that life is so much better once you improve your appearance. Fed up, Brooklyn unfollowed him. She expected it to fizzle, but instead he messaged her to ask why. Exasperated, she told him the truth: his behavior concerned her, she didn’t like what this community stood for, and she just wasn’t that attracted to him because of it.

Google searches for “how to looksmaxx” have risen 170% in the past five years.

That’s when the switch flipped. Ego freshly bruised, he quickly resorted to hurling insults. He called her a “makeupcel” (someone only attractive when wearing makeup), sent memes calling her a “sub 5” (basically, ugly), and said her facial ratios and maxilla were embarrassing (in looksmaxxing, it somehow always leads back to the jaw).

While she didn’t feel particularly stung by the exchange, it stuck with her. Given her history of anorexia, she understands his body image issues to a degree. But beyond that, she saw it as a dog whistle for racist propaganda. “I don't care about the symmetry of my face, as it comes to, like, pseudoscience. It was kind of funny, but then also kind of concerning that people like him exist in the wild,” she later added.

And exist, they do. In fact, it seems there’s been an onslaught of image-obsessed men newly emboldened to share their inner monologue with any audience they can get — including the women they claim to be pursuing. In fact, Google searches for “how to looksmaxx” have risen 170% in the past five years. The uptick is more than a little unsettling, given some of the intense lengths looksmaxxers may be tempted to go to in pursuit of their goals.

While less common than working out and facial optimization, some forums extoll the benefits of strategies like “bonesmashing,” hitting your face with a hammer or similar blunt object in order to traumatize and swell the underlying bone for a more sculpted look. Or, as 20-year-old looksmaxxing influencer Braden Peters, aka Clavicular, once admitted to, injecting fat-dissolving substances above his penis in an effort to make it look larger by comparison.

Clavicular, who has nearly 850,000 followers on TikTok — and who was arrested in late March on misdemeanor battery charges — may represent the extreme, but the general spirit of his manifesto has trickled down into hoards of other influencers, and perhaps to regular guys who have yet to experiment with jaw-enhancing exercises.

On the most recent season of Love Is Blind, for example, Chris Fusco confessed to his fiancée Jessica Barrett, a conventionally beautiful woman and successful doctor, that he wasn’t fully attracted to her because she didn’t appear to do CrossFit or Pilates every day. Meanwhile, on our smaller screens, scores of men have taken to X and TikTok to critique the alleged discrepancy between Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu’s appearance with and without makeup. One noted that he was going to start taking makeup remover wipes on dates.

Given how preoccupied he was with his own looks, she started to wonder if he took issue with hers. “I was like, ‘Oh, is he not trying to sleep with me because of my body?’”

Although it began in niche internet forums, looksmaxxing has gone mainstream. The lingo was quickly memed by Gen Z, and with all due respect to Sarah Sherman’s frighteningly apt parody on Saturday Night Live last month, it’s fair to say it’s reached peak pop culture. While it may be punchline fodder for some, others say it’s making an already-challenging dating scene even less forgiving. As these insecure men become fixated on aesthetics in increasingly granular detail, are they getting way too comfortable openly judging the looks of their potential partners? For Brooklyn and many other women, the answer is a resounding yes.

“It makes me feel disgusted & insecure”

Brooklyn told me about a recent hookup where, after they’d been intimate, he expressed a sigh of relief. He confessed he’d been worried about what she might look like naked because she’s a feminist. “Oh, God, I'm so happy that, like, you don't have armpit hair,” he told her. Brooklyn was stunned. “You have this beautiful girl in front of you getting undressed and you're worried about her armpit hair? That's just crazy to me,” she says.

Sydney, a 24-year-old from New York who works in product development and has gone on 20 first dates in the past year, has also noticed a rise in men’s critical comments about women’s bodies. Last spring, she was out to dinner with her then-boyfriend and a group of friends when he announced to the table with contempt that he considered Tate McRae and Kylie Jenner to be plus-sized, and would never want to date them.

“It makes me feel disgusted and insecure, because I think about these women who I perceive as being so beautiful, if not the ideal,” she says. “Hearing them spoken so negatively about by a partner who sees you when you're the most vulnerable, when you're naked, makes you question the way that they're viewing you.” She broke up with him three weeks later.

Now, Sydney tries to screen for this kind of attitude. On dates, she asks about their relationship deal-breakers, and the results have been illuminating. A few months ago, one guy shared that his biggest fear was not being physically attracted to his future wife. He told Sydney, “I could never stand it if my wife let herself go.” It was both a first and last date. She finds the whole thing somewhat exhausting, and she can’t understand what’s moving them to be so brazen. “I think that they need to buy more diaries or something. Like, these are inside thoughts,” she says.

But beneath the bravado, these men seem to be deeply insecure. Recently, after Megan, a 37-year-old who lives in Los Angeles and works for a national union, hooked up with a guy, he sent a text that shocked her. He wrote:

“Random question. I'm just curious. Full honesty, how did I look with my shirt off? I have been working out for three months, and sometimes I can't tell if I'm making any progress or not, and I'm like, blind to my own body.”

Megan reassured him he looked good, but she never heard back. Given how preoccupied he was with his own looks, she started to wonder if he took issue with hers. “I was like, ‘Oh, is he not trying to sleep with me because of my body?’”

Megan’s been using dating apps on and off since 2013. Over the past two years, she’s noticed a rise in men’s profiles centering around fitness. They’re packed with gym selfies, and seem to use coded language like “looking for a hiking buddy” or “hoping to find someone to work out with” to mean, “I want someone slim.”

To her, it implies, “You don't actually care about me as a human. You care about me as a body, as an object.”

“We’d probably be paired up for breeding”

Looksmaxxers’ aesthetic scrutiny extends beyond themselves and the women they date. Society is up for debate, too. Last summer, Silvie, a 25-year-old in New York (who chose not to share her profession for privacy), was standing on a train platform when she overheard a group of people, mostly young men and one woman, commenting on their fellow commuters with oddly anatomical terminology. They called people chopped, they noted recessed mandibles, they commented on deep radixes. She quickly realized they were judging and ranking the complete strangers based on looksmaxxing criteria. Silvie thought, “I hope they don’t see me. I hope I’m not next.”

The unrealistic standards, obsessive tendencies, and erosion of self-esteem that looksmaxxing may be helping to entrench aren’t the only insidious factors at play. There’s a not-insignificant amount of overlap between looksmaxxing and the incel world. The PSL Scale, which categorizes physical beauty on a spectrum from “sub-human” to “Chad,” is named for the online communities PUAHate (pickup artist), SlutHate, and Lookism. Some have argued the ideal that these men are chasing — a prominent, squared jaw, straight hair, a narrow, straight nose bridge — is decidedly Eurocentric. There’s even an acronym floating around these spaces, “JBW,” that stands for “just be white.”

“I think that they need to buy more diaries or something. Like, these are inside thoughts.”

Silvie is 5-foot-11, and recently went out on a second date in Central Park with a man who was roughly 6-foot-4. He started talking about how cute and tall their theoretical children would be. She recalls him saying, “We both have really good genetics. If this was a dystopian society, we'd probably be paired up for breeding.”

She found the conversation utterly bizarre, and they never went out again. After all, who gets to decide who has good genetics? Are we so quick to forget that socio-political movements steeped in notions of genetic supremacy often beget terrifying ends?

Though looksmaxxing has embraced some dangerous ideology and practices, at its core, there’s a kernel of truth. Attractive people make more money. They may get lighter sentences if they’re convicted of a crime. Even infants appear to be instinctually drawn to more symmetrical faces. It’s not impossible to see why hopeful daters assume that once their looks are properly optimized, heaps of desirable singles will fall into their laps.

“Girls are, like, the OG looksmaxxers”

Looksmaxxers are stereotyped as embittered, shallow womanizers, but Trevor Larcom breaks that mold. A 21-year-old actor and influencer from Florida, he was overweight as a kid and it had a massive impact on his mental health. “I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw,” he says, recalling how he’d think, “‘I’ll do anything.” Trevor prayed to God to lose weight.

At 18, a close friend taught him how to track calories and he began working out. By 19, he still wasn’t having the success he hoped for in the dating department, which is when he turned to looksmaxxing forums. He chewed hard gum to exercise his masseter muscles and create the look of a fuller jaw. He dunked his face in ice water to reduce puffiness. He began a self-tanning routine. He happily tints his eyebrows to amp up the contrast with his fair skin, and doesn’t care at all when online commenters call it “fruity.”

By his own account, he estimates that losing 130 pounds took him from sub-five to low-tier normie on the looksmaxxing scale, but he didn’t ascend to a high-tier normie until he started employing the facial strategies. Today, his self-esteem is higher than ever.

That confidence has, in part, led him into a happy relationship with a blonde, blue-eyed young woman with whom he makes half-serious, half-parody TikToks about dating a looksmaxxer. Aside from her getting annoyed with the smell of his self-tanner and being kept awake by his late-night chin-tucking exercises, he says she likes that he cares about his looks. He admitted, though, that even his own girlfriend — by his estimate, a high-tier Becky (the female equivalent of a high-tier normie) with excellent bone structure — had expressed a feeling of being judged when they hang out with other looksmaxxers.

While he understands why women at large are frustrated with how the movement is shaping the dating landscape, he points out that most wear makeup. “Girls are, like, the OG looksmaxxers,” he says.

According to Trevor, some men pursue looksmaxxing after experiencing romantic rejection. “A lot of people kind of use it as a revenge thing,” he says. “If they start looking better, then they’ll look at women and be like, ‘Oh, you didn’t give me attention before, but now that I look a little better, now I don’t like you.’” Some channel their newfound confidence into pursuing one-night stands. But to Trevor, it makes much more sense to funnel that into other ventures, like a better job or trying a new sport.

It’s deeply human to want to take pride in your appearance. And perhaps, as Brooklyn theorizes, “[For] these types of men, the women they choose to date has everything to do with how other men will perceive them.” Women on today’s dating scene, however, just don’t want to feel like there’s one specific way they, or their partners, need to look. And they’re starting to get angry.

“The men aren't OK, and I feel like they're going to continue to not be OK so long as women aren't sharing their stories,” Megan says. “Sure, we want someone who takes care of themselves. [But] if you're doing it because you think that your bigger muscles are going to attract a girl, gross.”