Looksmaxxing gives a new name to an old desire: changing one's appearance to gain status. Online, however, the practice can turn a face into a technical project, with measurements, rankings and escalating interventions presented as if attractiveness were an objective score.
The label covers very different behaviours. Basic skincare, grooming, exercise and clothing are often called “softmaxxing.” More extreme content promotes unregulated drugs, severe dieting, cosmetic procedures or intentional facial injury. Treating all of those choices as one movement hides the most important distinction: ordinary self-care is not medically equivalent to an untested attempt to alter bone, teeth or hormones.
Interviews Show a Trend, Not Its Population Size
ABC News Australia interviewed teenagers in June 2026 about looksmaxxing content they had encountered. The boys described cheek biting, peptide and steroid use, and a practice known as “bone smashing,” in which people strike the jaw in the belief that injury will make it more prominent. Their accounts establish that the material reaches young users; they do not establish how many teenagers try each practice.
The report also described Omoggle, a site that scans, scores and ranks faces in head-to-head comparisons. Its creator said the rating was a game mechanic for adults, not an objective judgment. Researchers and teenagers interviewed by ABC argued that the quantitative presentation can obscure how subjective and changeable beauty standards are.
That evidentiary limit matters. A handful of interviews cannot support claims that US high-school students as a group spend hours measuring their mandibles, that a generation is withdrawing from social life or that participation has produced a collective mental-health collapse. It can support a narrower conclusion: young people are seeing a vocabulary that presents appearance as a hierarchy and some encounter practices capable of physical harm.
Mewing Claims Do Not Have Clinical Support
Mewing is commonly described as holding the tongue against the roof of the mouth to produce a sharper jaw. The American Association of Orthodontists says there is no current research showing that the technique improves the jawline or oral health. Facial bones, muscles, teeth and bite develop and interact through processes that a social-media demonstration cannot reduce to one posture.
The AAO also warns that forcing the tongue into an unnatural position can apply uneven pressure. Potential consequences include disrupted tooth alignment, bite problems, temporomandibular-joint pain and speech difficulty. That does not mean every person who thinks about tongue posture will be injured. It means a claim to reshape the face is not a harmless promise when the proposed force acts on teeth and the jaw.
Intentional striking is more direct. There is no need to reproduce a bone-smashing method to assess it: deliberately injuring the face cannot create controlled surgical remodeling. Jaw pain, dental damage, suspected fracture, altered bite or difficulty opening the mouth warrants clinical evaluation rather than another online tutorial.
Legitimate orthodontic or maxillofacial treatment is different from an aesthetic hack. Clinicians examine function, alignment, growth, imaging and risks before moving teeth or jawbones. Cosmetic and reconstructive procedures can have valid indications, but a filtered image or anonymous rating cannot determine whether an intervention is appropriate.
Concern About Appearance Is Not Automatically a Diagnosis
The language around looksmaxxing often jumps from “self-improvement” to “dysmorphia.” Neither label can diagnose an individual. Many people care about grooming or feel insecure without having a mental-health disorder, and participation in an online trend does not by itself prove body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD.
The NHS defines BDD by persistent worry about perceived appearance flaws, often accompanied by repeated comparison, mirror checking or avoidance, concealment and significant effects on daily life. It is common in teenagers and young adults and can affect people of any gender. The threshold is not whether someone dislikes a photograph; it is the time, distress and impairment associated with the preoccupation.
That distinction avoids two harms. It does not minimize a young person whose checking, dieting, procedures or social avoidance have become consuming. It also does not stigmatize every boy interested in skincare or fitness as psychologically unwell. A clinician can assess symptoms and safety without treating concern about appearance as vanity.
Parents and educators can ask what content a young person sees, how it makes them feel and whether it is changing eating, exercise, spending, school or social behaviour. Urgent physical symptoms need medical attention; persistent appearance-related distress merits discussion with a qualified health professional.
The Business Model Rewards an Unfinishable Project
Online rankings create a built-in escalation problem. A score implies precision, while an algorithm can always identify another ratio, angle or feature to optimize. Products and procedures then enter as answers to defects that the ranking system has just named.
A sweeping indictment that describes young men as fragile or their bodies as depreciating assets repeats the dehumanization it claims to oppose. The evidence does not justify diagnosing a generation, inventing a cosmetic-market takeover or assuming that every platform user will progress from grooming to injury.
The sharper criticism is narrower and harder to evade. Anyone selling a jaw trainer, peptide, scoring app or procedure should carry the burden of proving the promised benefit and disclosing the risk. Platforms should not let visual polish and numerical scoring impersonate medical evidence. Young men do not need another hierarchy telling them their faces are failures. They need claims about their bodies held to a standard stronger than an engagement metric.