Looksmaxxing, also termed looksmaxing or looksmaxx, refers to a set of practices aimed at maximizing physical attractiveness through behavioral, cosmetic, medical, and sometimes surgery even extreme physical interventions.  In 2023, it became a popular trend, originating from the manosphere—a network of subcultures focusing on masculinity, men's issues, and anti-feminism—spanning self-improvement, men's rights, and "alpha male" ideologies that many critics have called misogynistic. 


Although looksmaxxing was niche at first, confined to forums most people never knew existed, it first quickly reached mainstream communities, with searches growing nearly 1300% in the month of July 2023. The trend has since recently grown increasingly popular, with searches having grown by 59% in April this year. This month, the trend is still showing where it used to be in the peak of 2024. Terms like mewing, an oral posture technique where you flatten your tongue against the roof of your mouth, and mogging, internet slang for outshining or appearing superior to another person based on physical appearance, migrated right into mainstream short form content, and what was initially spread as a joke stopped being ironic as some began to seriously consider looksmaxxing.


"Mogging" explained by the Urban Dictionary.


Every second spent watching a looksmaxxing video registers as interest, feeding it back into the algorithm and bringing in more views, and ultimately, the eyes of teenage boys. Most platforms don’t censor looksmaxxing content causing the content to keep getting pushed out, gaining influence.


As looksmaxxing became increasingly popular, systems such as PSL and platforms such as Omoggle exacerbated the issue of relentless competition. PSL, A rating scale used in the looksmaxxing community to score how attractive someone’s face is, scores faces on a 1 to 8 scale representing attractiveness, in spite of having no real scientific explanation behind it. 


Boys are sorted into tiers with names like normie, Chadlite, and Chad, and, at the bottom, chud, a decades-old horror-movie insult repurposed as the lowest rung of the hierarchy. Losing badly enough on these scales, inside the harshest corners of these forums, has been met with users being told to end their lives. 


Omoggle, a website that utilizes PSL to run competitions based on attractiveness between strangers, lets users rate and be rated in real time by whoever they are randomly paired with. Together, these platforms turned looks into something to rank, score, and compete over. The development of new technology only aided the spread, from social media algorithms to the endless scroll of short form videos. 


Experts warn that parents should be concerned for their kids falling into this trend. 


With cultural norms promoting strict beauty ideals and a hierarchy based on value, experts argue that teenagers engaging in looksmaxxing can develop body dysmorphia, anxiety, and diminished self esteem from toxic comparison. 


What begins as wanting to achieve personal growth can quickly turn into self-harming behaviors, as many boys go through extreme measures like bonesmashing in an attempt to improve their looks according to the looksmaxxing community’s favored traits. Bonesmashing involves striking your own jaw or cheekbones on the theory that the healing bone will reform into a sharper shape, can cause real fractures, nerve damage, and permanent disfigurement, according to doctors who study the trend. 


A psychiatrist at Baylor College of Medicine has linked the more extreme looksmaxxing behaviors, including repeated cosmetic surgery, directly to body dysmorphic disorder. He notes that the same pattern shows up alongside anxiety, depression, and elevated rates of suicidality. A mental health expert writing for PBS goes further, arguing that looksmaxxing behaviors so closely resemble eating disorders and body dysmorphia symptoms that treating them as a quirky trend rather than a clinical warning sign does real harm. 


Furthermore, looksmaxxing promotes a falsifying belief that women are only attracted to hyper-masculine traits. Particularly, misogyny lies in reducing women as a homogenous group that solely values a certain biological feature, thereby denying their diversity and individual depths. 


When it comes to helping boys work through toxic looksmaxxing trends, there are many practical steps that parents can take. It is crucial to stay curious rather than critical when kids bring up online trends, dismissing their concerns or making fun of them tends to close any opportunities for real conversation. It is also helpful to make a point of praising their character, kindness, and talents rather than focusing on appearance. Encouraging offline activities, like sports, hobbies, and real friendships, gives them a healthy balance against pressures they might encounter online. 


Additionally, parents need to be especially aware of more alarming red flags: sudden changes in diet, secretly taking supplements or unregulated products, or an intense fixation on body image. These might seem like minor peculiarities; however, they can be a signal of deep inner struggle. If signs of extreme distress emerge, seeking support from a doctor, therapist, or professional might be the next step.


But ultimately, addressing the looksmaxxing phenomenon requires challenging not just the physical obsessions, but the toxic ideology underpinning them. It is useful to remember that because looksmaxxing stems from the manosphere, its fixation on rigid physical hierarchies is deeply entwined with misogyny, reducing both women to shallow, transactional targets and young men to quantified commodities. 


By guiding boys away from these reductive online echo chambers, parents and educators can help them unlearn harmful biases about women and beauty. Real self-worth and healthy relationships are built on empathy, mutual respect, and emotional maturity, qualities that no algorithm or physical intervention can ever engineer.