In recent months, a trend has circulated on the TikTok platform that encourages teenage boys to reach their best physical version. It is known as looksmaxxing and has already accumulated more than 3 billion views on the social network. Young adolescents who do not feel comfortable with their appearance try to improve it with practices such as mewing, which consists of “training the jaw” to enlarge it, and bone smashing, which encourages shaping the bones of the face using hammer blows. . The objective? Achieve a “more masculine” appearance. Practices that, according to experts, can cause irreversible injuries.
This viral trend explains to young people how to 'maximize' all the features of their face. But what is this 'maxing'? The term comes from video game jargon, where characters have different abilities: attack, defense, speed... Which can be improved and increased in level. When a skill reaches its maximum level, it is said to be 'maxed'. In this internet fad, teenagers try to do the same with their face: 'max' their 'look' (image, in English), which is where the term looksmaxxing appears.
Media such as CNN and the New York Times have linked this term to incel forums. Incel is the acronym for the English expression involuntary celibate or involuntary celibate: heterosexual men who say they are incapable of having sexual relations with women and who blame them for it, to the point of demanding the legalization of rape and organizing massacres in the name of misogyny.
“Incel culture” is associated with far-right ideologies and white supremacy. They consider that having sexual relations with women is a right and that, if they do not allow them to exercise it, they must take it by force. Although they operate mainly in the United States, where they have carried out mass murders, shootings and abuses, they have also killed women in Europe.
This movement of men frustrated by not achieving sexual relationships with women has created its own jargon: according to them, women are divided between Stacys, attractive and unattainable women who only date Chads (muscular and popular men who sleep with many women). , and Beckys, “average” women. On online forums, women are referred to with dehumanizing terms such as “femoid” or even “FHO (female humanoid organism).” One of these terms created by incels is looksmaxing, which gives its name to the fashion we are talking about today.
This trend has emerged from incel circles and has reached TikTok, where many users (mostly teenage boys) share videos daily explaining the practices they carry out and show the change they have achieved in their face after starting to practice them. These adolescents undergo a public survey in which other users give their opinion about their physique and point out the aspects “to improve” in the comments. The video linked below alone has accumulated more than a million views, and it is just one of the thousands of videos of this trend that circulate on TikTok.
Looksmaxxing arises from incel forums, but the moment the fashion reaches social networks, many teenagers join it without knowing its origin. They simply go on TikTok and find videos of other young people their age who show them the physical change they have made in a short time and explain how to achieve it. So they decide to try the practices they suggest – even though some are highly dangerous – to change themselves too.
Knowing the landscape from which this trend arises helps to understand its objective: men want to touch up their physique to achieve a Chad appearance and thus achieve sexual relations with Stacys. The looksmaxxing furor is brewing in internet forums, where you can read entries such as: “Sexmaxing: How to become a sex god and get girls to become addicted to you.” In these anonymous chats, incels give each other advice on how to 'max' their physique.
The looksmaxxing trend has two aspects: softmaxxing, which includes tips such as changing clothing or hairstyle, using skin products and doing physical training to improve appearance, and hardmaxxing, which involves more invasive techniques, such as the consumption of asteroids. and aesthetic operations such as jaw fillers, chin augmentation, rhinoplasty, penis enlargement... Some users even suggest drastic bone restructuring surgeries.
The video we link below shows ways to 'max' the eye area, from more natural practices to surgical options. This TikTok profile has more than 80,000 followers and countless videos dedicated to looksmaxxing.
These surgeries are the center of several debates and chat groups on internet forums. On TikTok, some of the best-known practices are: mewing, gua sha, eyepulling, skincare or, the most extreme: bones smashing.
After all these practices went viral on TikTok platforms, some dentists, doctors and aesthetic professionals have published videos explaining their dangers. They have especially criticized mewing and bone smashing: practices that can have serious consequences. Many of the videos practicing bone smashing have been deleted by the users themselves after many professionals began to strongly criticize this practice.
Plastic surgeon Prem Tripathi posted a video on TikTok, where he expressed: “I never thought I would have to say this, but please don't break the bones in your face intentionally. Breaking the bones in your face is not going to give you a strong jaw.”
Dr. Mercè Quintillá, an expert in aesthetic and anti-aging medicine, assures that it is “a dangerous practice that can cause very serious injuries to bones, nerves and blood vessels.” “If these kids really have any aesthetic concerns, they should go to expert surgeons,” she concludes.
Prem Tripathi also asks the public to stop practicing mewing: "Do not use chewing molds that claim to give you a more marked jaw, because what you are going to achieve is destroy your jaw joint." Simón Pardiñas, dentist and scientific communicator, joins this criticism and assures that “There is no scientific evidence to support the results of mewing.”
“The fact that a man wants to define that mandibular definition, cheekbones or forehead, perhaps is associated with virility: they see it as a sign of masculinity,” says Patricia Barba, psychologist and psychotherapist specialized in self-esteem and body image. But “it really has nothing to do with that, but with the ideal of beauty or the ideal of man that these people have built for themselves.”
In today's digital age, social media plays an important role in influencing perceptions of beauty and self-esteem. The pressure to conform to unrealistic beauty standards displayed on social media can lead some people to take drastic measures without fully considering the risks or consulting with professionals.
“The fact of being constantly exposed to a certain image makes you create a pattern in your mind of what is considered beautiful,” explains Patricia Barba. This happens with the looksmaxxing trend: teenagers “can feel inferior for looking different from that canon, which is unreal.” They convince themselves that “what these fashions say is normal and desirable and that, if I'm not like that, I'm not worth it and I'm not going to be happy.”
“We are promoting a canon that is not natural and that, to achieve, it is necessary to resort to external methods such as cosmetic surgery,” says the psychologist. For this reason, “aesthetic practices that are potentially harmful and that can cause irreversible injuries are increasingly resorted to, not only to comply with the canon of beauty, but also to feel that you fit into society.”
According to Barba, practicing bones smashing “shows low self-esteem, because no one consciously and voluntarily hurts themselves for an aesthetic purpose.” She points out that, if the person really wants to make a cosmetic change, there are safer methods, and that engaging in dangerous practices of this style shows an obsession with obtaining quick results that can reveal serious self-esteem problems.
The report The reality of cosmetic surgery in Spain prepared by the Spanish Society of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery (SECPRE) shows that cosmetic surgery interventions in Spain increased by 215% between 2014 and 2021, with an increase of three points in the men.
“This is making a big dent in people's self-esteem, because validation is being encouraged only in something external: the image, and everything else is ignored,” says the psychologist. Furthermore, she explains that adolescents are a vulnerable audience because they are in a vital stage in which they have not yet developed critical capacity and cannot filter all the messages they receive.
But “social networks are here to stay; If it is not one, it will be another, so let's make responsible use of them," concludes the psychologist. According to Barba, the solution has to be to improve our relationship with these media instead of focusing on limiting the time teenagers use the networks. As Barba explains, doing so “can be experienced as an imposition that already generates rejection from the start.”
