The Face You Were Born With Isn’t Good Enough, Apparently

A beginner’s guide to the internet’s most earnest spiral into self-loathing dressed up as self-improvement

I want to tell you about a young man on TikTok.

He is seventeen, probably. He has good cheekbones. He is pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth with the focused intensity of someone defusing a bomb, because he has been reliably informed by the internet that this technique… will restructure his jawline. Over time. Gradually. Through bone pressure.

He calls this “mewing.”

He is also doing it while watching a video about “bonesmashing,” which is, I am not making this up, the practice of repeatedly striking your own face with a blunt object to encourage bone density and remodelling. The theory, apparently, is that controlled trauma forces the skull to rebuild itself into something more angular.

I want to sit quietly with that sentence for a moment.

Hitting yourself in the face on purpose … to become more attractive.

Welcome to looksmaxxing. Pull up a chair. Or don’t, because apparently your posture while sitting affects your facial structure, and we can’t have you slipping.

So, What Actually Is This?

Looksmaxxing is, at its simplest description, the pursuit of maximising your physical attractiveness. Full stop. That’s the elevator pitch.

At the benign end, it looks like: get a decent haircut, find clothes that fit, sort out your skin, lift a few weights, stand up straight. This is, I should point out, just… being an adult. We used to call it grooming. We used to call it self-respect. Now it has a name, a subculture, and an entire lexicon of jargon that makes it sound like a graduate programme.

At the other end of the spectrum, you find the bone-smashers. The ones tracking their facial symmetry with callipers. The ones who have rated themselves a “PSL 4.2” on a scale they invented and are devastated about it. The ones who have decided that the shape of their skull is both the problem and the solution, and that the answer lies somewhere between a surgeon’s blade and a blunt instrument.

The gap between “I bought some moisturiser” and “I am engineering my own skeleton” is, in theory, quite large. In practice, the internet has a talent for making that gap feel like a gentle slope.

Where Did This Come From?

Looksmaxxing didn’t appear from nowhere. It crawled out of the incels and manosphere forums of the 2010s, where a specific and rather grim worldview had taken root: that men’s worth, particularly their romantic worth, is almost entirely determined by physical appearance, and that this appearance can be optimised like a piece of software.

From those forums came a whole language for ranking people. A “Chad” is the ideal man: tall, angular jaw, broad shoulders, effortlessly dominant. A “Stacy” is the female equivalent: beautiful, shallow, unattainable. A “normie” is everyone else, plodding along in ignorance of the hierarchy they’re operating in. And a “blackpill” is the bleak philosophical centre of the whole thing: the belief that your looks largely determine your fate, genetics is destiny, and effort is mostly theatre.

It is, if you strip away the jargon, a remarkably elegant system for making young men feel terrible about themselves while convincing them it’s wisdom.

The “blackpill” is particularly interesting as a piece of philosophical architecture. It borrows the format of radical insight… “most people are too cowardly to see the truth”… while delivering the content of despair. It feels transgressive. It feels honest. It is, in practice, fatalism with a Reddit account.

The TikTok Era: When the Forums Got a Glow-Up

Here is the pivot.

The original forums were grim little places. Long threads. Dense arguments about “sexual market value.” Aggressive community policing. Not exactly a place for casual browsing.

Then TikTok happened.

Someone took the ideas, stripped out the more overtly miserable parts, added good lighting and a decent soundtrack, and suddenly you had “looksmaxxing content.” Clean. Aspirational. Fast. Young men talking about their skincare routines over lo-fi beats, recommending jawline exercises with the gentle enthusiasm of lifestyle influencers, explaining their morning routines with the kind of earnest detail previously reserved for Olympic training programmes.

The ideology survived the rebrand. It just got better lighting.

This is the zoomer version of looksmaxxing, and it is genuinely more widespread than its forum-dwelling ancestor, because it is enormously more accessible. You don’t have to seek out a miserable corner of the internet. It finds you. It’s in your For You Page at 11pm. It’s perfectly edited. The person delivering it has, to be fair, excellent skin.

The Vocabulary, Which I Am Afraid You Need to Know

Every subculture invents a language, because language creates community, and community creates belonging. The looksmaxxing vocabulary is particularly rich, and also slightly exhausting.

Mogging is to visually outclass someone in terms of attractiveness. You can “mog” someone at a party. You can be “mogged” by a stranger who happens to be taller. The concept of simply existing near an attractive person and feeling slightly inadequate has been taxonomised, named, and turned into a competitive framework.

Ascending means levelling up your appearance to a higher tier. You might “ascend from sub-5 to normie” through a combination of skincare, gym, haircut, and… tongue posture. The language of ascension is interesting, because it takes what is fundamentally a journey towards self-acceptance and re-frames it as a leaderboard.

Chadfishing is presenting yourself as more “Chad” than you are, particularly online. The fact that this has a name tells you everything about the degree to which “Chad status” is treated as a measurable and transferable commodity.

Mewing, as our young friend at the top of this piece has discovered, is the tongue posture technique. Named after an actual orthodontist, Dr John Mew, whose actual clinical ideas have been taken, stripped of nuance, and turned into a facial reconstruction promise that most actual orthodontists find mildly horrifying.

There are also numerical rating systems, a dizzying array of “maxxing” variants (looksmaxxing, statusmaxxing, moneymaxxing, and the brilliantly self-aware “jestermaxxing,” which is becoming funny as a strategy for social status), and a hierarchy of subgroups that would take an anthropologist several papers to map properly.

My personal favourite piece of vocabulary, if “favourite” is the right word, is the phrase “sub-5 low-tier normie.” This is a person who has absorbed a worldview in which human beings are rated on a numerical scale, assessed their own score, found it wanting, and invented a subcategory for their own inadequacy.

I find that both darkly funny and quite heartbreaking, often at the same time.

The Psychology, Which Is Actually the Point

Here is where I stop making jokes for a moment, because the psychology underneath all this is genuinely worth understanding.

Looksmaxxing, at its core, is a control narrative. And control narratives are enormously seductive when you feel out of control.

If you are a teenage boy who feels overlooked, or socially behind, or confused about why life seems easier for other people, the looksmaxxing pipeline offers something very compelling: a diagnosis and a prescription. The diagnosis is that your appearance is the problem. The prescription is a project. And projects feel good when you feel stuck, because projects mean progress, and progress means hope.

The trouble is that the project never ends. Optimisation doesn’t have a finish line. Once you start measuring yourself against an idealised standard, the standard moves. You sort out your skin, and then it’s the jawline. You address the jawline, and then it’s the frame. You build the frame, and then it’s the face shape again, and perhaps this time something more surgical will be required.

This is not unique to looksmaxxing, by the way. You can find the same logic in biohacking culture, in the “Enhanced Games” and their cheerful endorsement of performance-enhancing drugs, in the entire optimisation industry that tells you you’re always one supplement, one protocol, one upgrade away from being acceptable. It is, in the end, a machine for manufacturing permanent dissatisfaction dressed up as self-improvement.

The hidden cruelty is this: young men who enter this world looking for confidence and belonging sometimes find, instead, a community that confirms their worst fears about themselves and then offers increasingly extreme solutions.

The More Sinister Layer

I should be honest about this, because the lifestyle-content version of looksmaxxing is not the whole picture.

In the spaces where this started, there is often a layer of ideology that goes beyond vanity. The classification of people into Chads and normies and sub-5s carries implicit ideas about who is valuable and who isn’t. The treatment of women as judges in a sexual market, rather than people, is baked into the original framing. And the “blackpill” philosophy, in its darker expressions, has bled into genuine misogyny and, in some cases, into the rhetoric of men who have done serious harm.

I am not saying that everyone who has ever done a jaw exercise hates women. That would be absurd.

I am saying that the language and the logic of the more extreme version of this culture has real ideological content, and that content is worth naming clearly. Treating appearance as the measure of human value, framing romantic rejection as injustice, building a worldview around hierarchy and resentment… these things have consequences, and they are not trivial.

The lifestyle TikTok version is often fairly harmless. The rabbit warren underneath it is not always so.

What I Actually Think

I am a man who has thought a reasonable amount about appearance, self-presentation, and the gap between who you are and who you’d like to be. I think most people have. That’s human.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to look your best. There is nothing wrong with exercise, or skincare, or buying clothes that suit you, or caring about how you present yourself to the world. These things can be part of self-respect, creativity, and how you engage with the world around you.

What looksmaxxing, at its worst, does is take that ordinary human impulse and weaponise it. It takes “I’d like to feel good about myself” and turns it into “I am a flawed unit with suboptimal bone structure and my value as a human being is currently a 3.7 out of 10.” It replaces self-care with self-surveillance. It replaces confidence with metrics.

And it does this, almost entirely, to young men who are already struggling with exactly the kind of insecurity that deserves gentleness, not a ranking system.

The internet has a gift for finding the soft, uncertain parts of a young person’s identity and building an elaborate ideology around them. Looksmaxxing is one of the more creative examples.

The antidote, I think, is not to pretend that appearance doesn’t matter at all, because it does, in some ways, and pretending otherwise is just a different kind of unhelpfulness. The antidote is to remember that it is one thing among many, and that a person’s worth is not legible from their face, however many tongue exercises they do.

Also: please don’t hit yourself in the face with a hammer.

That one really should go without saying.

If you found yourself nodding along to any part of the “I am a flawed unit” section with more recognition than you’d like… that’s worth talking to someone about. Not an internet forum. An actual person.

Until Next Time