Inside the world of looksmaxxing where flaws can be fixed at a price

Looksmaxxing: The business of telling young men they are not attractive enough The seductive logic of looksmaxxing began with a promise to make young men better. Then it went too far. At 20 years old, Cyrus's days are organised around numbers. He estimates his body fat is close to 10 per cent and is trying to bulk to 100 kilograms. In the morning, Cyrus straps a cuff around his arm to establish a baseline blood-pressure reading, then pricks his finger to check his fasting blood glucose. He counts calories and tracks his sleep, wary that a bad night could crash his testosterone levels. His body is something to be measured, its changes carefully monitored. One morning, the numbers give him pause. "I'm not going to lie to you. It's 125 over 40 with a 72 resting heart rate," he says in a recent video documenting his bulking routine. "That's not good at all." Cyrus's regimen extends beyond the gym. He takes an assortment of medications and supplements, tans because he says it makes his muscles look more defined, and dyes his hair and eyebrows to improve his colouring. About some of his other methods, he is more circumspect. But there are hints at the lengths involved: a recent echocardiogram detected "very slight changes" to his heart. When Cyrus talks about his body, he treats it as something between a spreadsheet and a software system waiting to be calibrated. In his worldview, almost everything can be improved. "I believe looksmaxxing is about more than just improving your physical appearance," Cyrus says. "It's also about your cognition and your mind … you're optimising your biology." Still, he insists with a chuckle, it is "not a full-time occupation at all". What Cyrus calls "looksmaxxing" is a sprawling online movement devoted to maximising physical attractiveness. Ordinary grooming, dieting and exercise sit at one end of the spectrum ("softmaxxing"); cosmetic procedures, experimental drugs and extreme attempts to alter the face and body — including "bonesmashing", the practice of striking facial bones — sit at the other ("hardmaxxing"). Looksmaxxers have developed an elaborate vocabulary for measuring their progress. Faces are dissected into jaw angles, eye shapes and proportions, then ranked according to "sexual market value". On the so-called PSL scale, using the initials of three online communities, the hierarchy stretches from "subhuman" at the bottom, through "normies" and "chadlites", to the almost cartoonishly masculine "Gigachad" at the top. There is also "mewing", tongue exercises purported to develop the jaw; "mogging", the act of physically outclassing someone; and a "failo", a perceived flaw considered severe enough to diminish an otherwise attractive face. The ultimate goal is "ascension": through this imagined hierarchy of attractiveness. Though its language borrows from meme culture and internet slang, looksmaxxing is not satire. What started on niche online forums has been popularised and redefined on mainstream platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and reaching a widening demographic While there is no official count of the number of looksmaxxers in Australia, a 2025 report by the Movember Institute of Men's Health found almost two-thirds (63 per cent) of Australian men aged 16 to 25 engage with masculinity influencers. Cyrus's introduction to this way of thinking came after a break-up, when he met one of Australia's biggest looksmaxxing influencers, Androgenic, in Brisbane's nightlife district. Androgenic offered advice on improving his appearance, and Cyrus later began helping behind the scenes with parts of his coaching business. What impressed him most was the way Androgenic commanded respect from those around him. For millions of young men and boys encountering looksmaxxing on social media, this is its seductive promise. A better jawline or body is not presented as an aesthetic achievement, but as something capable of fixing social isolation, career barriers and romantic frustration. Cyrus believes he has experienced those returns firsthand. In high school he was picked on "a decent amount". The bullying became particularly noticeable after he buzzed his hair and, in his view, became "very unconventionally unattractive". "I was treated far worse and a good percentage of that was due to my looks because the way I was treated improved after I changed my appearance," he says. The transformation, Cyrus says, has "massively increased" his confidence and improved his quality of life. "There was a very positive feedback loop from going out and getting the 'halo effect', as people call it, where you just get treated better." It is this core belief — changing the face can change the way the world responds to you — that gives looksmaxxing its power. Researchers say the same pursuit of control can lead young men somewhere else entirely: towards increasingly extreme interventions, communities steeped in fatalism and misogyny, and a marketplace that profits from ensuring there is always another flaw to fix. What does it mean to be a man? While women have faced pressures regarding beauty since time immemorial, looksmaxxing has emerged primarily as a male-centric subculture over the past decade. Researchers say it taps into a generation trying to answer a fundamental question: what does it mean to be a man when the traditional blueprint no longer fits? Associate Professor Scott Griffiths, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne who studies male body image, says young men are more preoccupied with appearance than ever before. Social media intensifies the pressure, but is only part of the story. As gender roles shift and the expectation that men should be sole providers has waned, physical appearance has become another way of performing manhood. "If you can't do it by becoming the breadwinner," Griffiths says, "you can build a body that others will perceive as masculine." It is an ideal many young men have internalised: an Adonis-like figure whose "hunter eyes", strong brow ridge and sharply angled jaw promise something beyond beauty. Research suggests people with these traits are perceived as more masculine, reinforcing the belief that appearance can stand in for identity. The impulse to read meaning into the face is hardly new. Across cultures and centuries, people have tried to infer character from the body's contours. The now-discredited practice of physiognomy treated facial features as clues to intelligence, morality and temperament. In the 19th century, "lion-like" features — a broad jaw, wide forehead and piercing gaze — were thought to signal nobility, courage and strength. A pointed, dog-like nose suggested an excitable nature, while a thick, rounded pig-like one signalled insensitivity. We now know faces cannot reliably reveal the character within. But appearances do affect how people are perceived, with research showing it influences everything from hiring decisions to earnings. This phenomenon is sometimes called "pretty privilege" — the idea that some people move through the world with advantages conferred simply by being perceived as attractive. Today, looksmaxxers take that premise further. If a face can shape how the world responds to you, perhaps changing the face can rewrite your fate. On platforms like Instagram and TikTok, few Australians embody that promise more completely than Androgenic, who has a following of more than 1.3 million. "I'm going to share the exact blueprint to ascend your looks using unconventional methods," Androgenic says in an online video, speaking in a deliberately affected vocal fry. The 25-year-old has a chiselled jaw and the sculpted physique of a superhero. Over ten minutes, he recounts a familiar origin story: he was once "scrawny", "underdeveloped", "invisible" to girls and "bullied" by his peers. Then he discovered looksmaxxing. Six years later, Androgenic says he has transformed himself. He claims to have grown three inches after puberty, reshaped his jaw, chin, cheekbones and brow ridge, gained 45 kilograms of muscle, changed his colouring, refined his skin, undergone cosmetic surgery and even "optimised" his brain. The reward, he says, has been confidence, career success, commanding respect wherever he goes and attracting "more attention from women than I know what to do with". He calls it the "halo effect". For $49 a month, Androgenic promises to remove the guesswork for others. His looksmaxxing program includes blood tests and hormone "protocols", facial analyses, surgery recommendations and even a "bonesmashing" guide. "No cope," he says. "Just real methods that drive real change." The deeper promise appears to be certainty: a blueprint for a body, and perhaps a life, that might otherwise feel governed by genetics, circumstance or chance. Dr Krista Fisher, a research fellow at the Movember Institute of Men's Health, says that offer can be seductive when young people are confronting multiple sources of uncertainty. While housing feels unattainable, careers unpredictable and relationships harder to navigate, the body can be one of few things that can be controlled. Young men around the world are experiencing high rates of anxiety and depression, Fisher says, alongside loneliness and social disconnection. Their online and offline lives have become intertwined, while the use of image — and performance-enhancing substances, including steroids and peptides, has grown. For Cyrus, the appeal of Androgenic was that his philosophy did not stop at the face. He describes the influencer's approach as "holistic", applying it to the body, the mind and everything around them. Borrowing the language of data science, Cyrus divides life into "vectors": appearance, money, the mind, status, relationships. Each can be invested in but, for now, appearance seems to him to offer the highest returns. "I do believe the ROI [return on investment] from improving your appearance will benefit you in so many other vectors," he says. "It's just something that will benefit you in all the aspects of your life." Once the body is understood as an investment, however, the question becomes how much a person is willing to put into it. Entering the manosphere Exercise and dieting are ordinary forms of self-care. But behind the language of "optimisation" lies an online ecosystem where pursuit of a better face can become entangled with extremist ideologies and self-harm. Looksmaxxing forums, where young men post selfies and exchange tips on improving their appearance, overlap with the broader "manosphere" — a constellation of online communities offering answers about dating, masculinity, status and self-worth, while often trafficking in resentment towards women and rigid gender ideals. "They are united in a certain grievance towards women," says Christopher David, a research associate in online extremism at Neu-Ulm University. "The belief is that feminism in primarily Western countries has wronged men and created a society where women have it easier than men." David calls that grievance the manosphere's "common denominator". Online, it is expressed through the language of the "red pill", borrowed from the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix. To take the red pill is to believe you have awakened to an uncomfortable truth about the world. At the manosphere's extreme edge sit "incels", or involuntary celibates. "They have this veneration of violence, the glorification of past violent attacks, and this very strong emotional venting towards women," David says. "You don't find the same type of language in other communities." Central to incel ideology is the "black pill" — a darker extension of the red pill. Its followers believe average or unattractive men are condemned by genetics to a predetermined fate in which they never find romantic or sexual partners. That worldview has been invoked by perpetrators of mass violence in north America. But violence towards others is not the only concern. David says research finds high levels of mental health problems in incel communities, and evidence some vulnerable men arrive in these spaces after seeking help elsewhere online. On Reddit, for example, it was found users who became active in incel communities had participated in suicide prevention or mental health forums "So we can see a pathway there," David says. Once inside, the language of optimisation can become brutally literal. A 2025 Canadian study documented men rating one another's faces on the 1-10 PSL scale, with assessments devolving into abuse. One user told a poster he had been "f***ed big time by nature" and that his face looked "grotesque". Another was assigned a PSL score of 2.25 to 2.5, before the user declared that "burn victims look better". A third delivered a verdict in the language of the rating system itself: "Death tier mouth to nose ratio … death tier eyes. Just give up." In the incel's black-pilled worldview, the face is evidence of a life already decided. Looksmaxxing offers a competing proposition: the verdict can be appealed — even if the appeal sometimes involves deliberately hurting yourself. David says looksmaxxing was initially dismissed by many incels as "a cope" — an attempt to avoid accepting the supposed reality of the black pill. Cyrus does not dispute the connection. Looksmaxxing emerged from incel culture "to a degree", he says, but has since fractured into distinct streams. "There are a lot of incels on these forums who are just projecting hate all day," he says. "But I wouldn't even classify them as real looksmaxxers because they're just rotting on forums instead of improving their lives." He points instead to Androgenic's paid community, which he describes as supportive. "Everyone is giving advice and uplifting others," argues Cyrus, who features on Androgenic's social platforms. "I've never met someone who's truly ascended who is hateful towards women." For some communities, researchers say, that distinction is genuine. But it does not eliminate the risk of what lies a few swipes away. "It's often not the ideologies that draw young men in," Fisher says. "That is the cost of what they are exposed to by virtue of engaging with content about the way they look and the way they behave." New research from the University of Melbourne found boys aged 13 to 17 are more likely to hold hostile attitudes towards women than their grandfathers' generation, with just over 30 per cent saying gender equality in Australia had "gone too far". The study found these attitudes were associated with the online content young people were consuming online. Fisher and her colleagues have developed a framework for the escalating "tiers" of content that they encounter. What begins with gym exercises, diet plans, grooming, sports and dating can gradually acquire messages about discipline, emotional restriction and male "worth". At the furthest extreme — less than 1 per cent of the videos they coded — the subtext becomes explicit: "misogyny and exclusivist ideologies, male supremacy, white supremacy, homophobia, [and] transphobia". The behaviours being promoted become more extreme too. "There are depictions of health risk-taking, so substance use, gambling, binge drinking, and physical augmentation like bone-smashing," Fisher says. One of looksmaxxing's best-known creators, Clavicular, has turned that extremity into spectacle. In livestreams to more than 423,000 followers on Kick, he has repeatedly struck his face with a hammer in an attempt to change its shape. During one broadcast in April, he appeared to lose consciousness while sitting with friends in a Miami restaurant. His body went limp on camera before the feed cut off. Hours later, he posted a photograph of his scraped-up face to X. "Just got home, that was brutal," he wrote. "All of the substances are just a cope trying to feel neurotypical while being in public, but obviously that isn't a real solution." For Fisher, the extremity reflects a broader message embedded in some of the darkest material pushed towards boys and young men online. "The undertone of this content is often that the world is broken, you are broken, and therefore the only way to make yourself feel better or to ascend as a man is these extreme health and social behaviours." And that messaging can arrive quickly. Fisher says research has found self-harm, incel, misogynistic or suicide-related material can appear within 30 minutes of a 17-year-old boy creating a new TikTok account. Another flaw to fix For some, the promise that almost anything can be improved is empowering. But if looksmaxxing offers a solution to every flaw, its business model also depends on convincing young men there is always another flaw to fix. "I do believe that it can become obsessive," Cyrus says. "It's easy to hyper-fixate on one feature or flaw that you have." He says meditation and relationships can help keep that fixation in perspective, particularly when someone begins spiralling over a perceived flaw. "There's no benefit to rotting about it and letting it control your life." But in a rare moment of vulnerability, Cyrus admits he has come close to doing exactly that. At one point, he says, it was "very easy" to go down a rabbit hole. "I was impulsively considering using trenbolone to grow my bones, which is a very toxic and horrible compound for you," he says, with an embarrassed laugh. "But I'm very glad I didn't touch that at all because, for one, it is a cope." Trenbolone, or "Tren", is a powerful anabolic steroid developed to increase muscle mass in livestock and is not approved for human use. Anabolic steroids are associated with serious cardiovascular, liver and hormonal complications, as well as infertility and psychiatric effects. So where does ordinary self-improvement end and something more troubling begin? For Griffiths, one useful dividing line is the "reversibility" of the actions young men take. "If you are considering or are undertaking behaviours which have irreversible impacts on the body, for example, if you are taking anabolic steroids as a young man, you are risking irreversible changes to your fertility, to your cardiovascular health." Going to the gym, dieting or taking greater care over one's appearance is not intrinsically harmful, he says. Those pursuits can provide direction and help establish healthy habits. The warning signs emerge when the routines begin to exert control in the other direction: when missing a workout produces intense anxiety, looking in the mirror triggers thoughts of being "fat and ugly" or "worthless", or the pursuit of an ideal begins to involve potentially irreversible changes to the body. The 2025 Movember study, which surveyed young men in the UK and the US as well as in Australia, found 27 per cent of those who followed masculinity influencers experienced feelings of worthlessness, compared to 23 per cent of men who did not engage with their content. At that point, Griffiths says, someone is likely "overinvested" in their appearance and entering "dangerous territory". Looksmaxxing complicates that boundary because there is money to be made from moving it. An online economy has grown around male insecurities, offering everything from coaching and supplements to facial analyses, hormone protocols and cosmetic procedures. The more flaws that can be identified, the more solutions there are to sell. And, increasingly, those perceived flaws are not even being identified by a person. AI-powered looksmaxxing apps promise to analyse a photograph, score individual facial features and generate a personalised plan for improvement. David says generative AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to creating such tools; someone with little programming knowledge can build a rudimentary face-rating app in a matter of hours. But it is the business model behind some of these apps that concerns him. In his research, he examined discussions in which users shared screenshots and experiences of AI-generated assessments. A recurring pattern, he says, was an initially unflattering evaluation, often built around obscure measurements and relationships between facial features. "First you get this relatively negative assessment because the app needs to give you enough room for improvement," he says. "Because it's a subscription, right? So they want to keep you subscribed." The diagnosis is followed by an "ascension plan": a personalised list of interventions supposedly capable of raising the score. Some recommendations are mundane — exercise, for example — while others draw from looksmaxxing's more peculiar practices, such as "mewing". The use of AI lends these prescriptions an appearance of precision and reliability. What might once have been the opinion of an anonymous stranger on a forum can now arrive as a personalised assessment, seemingly generated from the geometry of your own face. "AI is used basically for this superficial assessment," David says, "and also for writing these ascension plans." It produces a peculiar paradox: an app promising to make its users more attractive has little incentive to tell them they are attractive enough already. And in the world of looksmaxxing, "enough" may be the one measurement that cannot be optimised. Is it game over? "There are lot of grifters who want to rip off young men who are vulnerable," Cyrus says. He points to influencers who promote "thumbpulling", a practice that involves pressing the thumbs against the roof of the mouth in the belief that it can widen the upper jaw or move the maxilla. For Griffiths, helping young men avoid self-destructive behaviour means teaching them to distinguish between the small truths on which looksmaxxing is built and the sweeping conclusions the manosphere constructs around them. "It concerns me that we could be walking into ever-more complex and irreversible and customisable ways of presenting our physical appearance that does nothing to build a stable and strong base of self-worth," Griffiths says. The problem, he says, is that there is little online to help young men separate "granules of truth" from the black-and-white thinking that turns them into rules for living. Take height, for example. Taller heterosexual men are, on average, perceived as more attractive by women. That is the granule of truth, Griffiths says. But a teenage boy worried about being short is unlikely to encounter it with those qualifications attached. Instead, he might be served video after video of men approaching women on the street and asking how tall a prospective boyfriend needs to be: "6 foot 2, 6 foot 3, 6 foot 1, 6 foot 2." "So instead of walking away with a grain of truth, and a reasonably sophisticated worldview that, on average, there are lots of different people out there with different interests and tastes, they walk away with [the assumption], if I'm not tall, if I'm just a short king, then it's game over for me." That sophistication is difficult to impart on social media, which thrives on sound bites and quick clicks. Fisher argues some of the work therefore needs to happen away from screens, in sporting clubs, community groups and other places where boys already gather. David says platforms could also do more to disrupt pathways towards blackpill material, including its constantly evolving euphemisms and abbreviations. The coded language creates another problem. To an uninitiated parent glancing at a teenager's phone, a feed filled with jawlines, gym routines and hairstyle advice might look like little more than adolescent vanity. "It might look very harmless," David says. "It is very camouflaged." More difficult still is imparting the idea that a person can improve himself without treating their body as a problem to be solved. For Cyrus, the promise remains that one day there will be an end point to his transformation. That somewhere beyond the next improvement lies a version of himself that he can finally stop optimising. "I will definitely reach a point where I am much more content with my overall appearance," he says, before quickly qualifying the admission. "Like, I'm not brutally insecure." Once he reaches that point, he says he can turn more fully towards the other "vectors" of his life: money, relationships, the mind. It is a revealing hierarchy: looks are not everything in Cyrus' worldview but improving them is imagined as a way of clearing the path towards everything else. Perhaps that is what makes looksmaxxing so compelling, and so difficult to disentangle from ordinary self-improvement. It takes a common adolescent fear — "Am I attractive enough to be loved?" — and offers the certainty of a system. The harder question is whether a person who has learned to see his face as a work in progress can ever recognise when the work is done. Credits Words: Audrey Courty Illustrations: Kylie Silvester Editor: Catherine Taylor - Share options - Copy link - X (formerly Twitter)