Looksmaxxing is an internet movement that seeks to maximize one’s appearance through various techniques varying from standard grooming to invasive procedures. Initially, looksmaxxing was limited to small, unnoticed online forums in the 2010s. For reasons unknown, the movement was brought to mainstream social media, then skyrocketed in popularity.
If the “self-improvement” aspect of looksmaxxing was limited to things you could control—hair, eyebrows, hygiene—then it would not be nearly as harmful. But the subjects that proponents of looksmaxxing aim to improve are largely facial and body features themselves. This divides different features into good and bad: features that many looksmaxxers attribute to certain races or ethnicities. It is no surprise that the agreed-upon “superior” features mainly belong to Europeans. Thus, the “bad” features are most often associated with everyone remaining.
Beyond a general description of lips or a nose, extreme looksmaxxers claim there are mathematical ways to determine the value of a face. There is a clear and frightening parallel between this and phrenology. Phrenology, a pseudoscience, believed the size and shape of a skull could reveal a person’s mental capabilities and characteristics. By measuring facial dimensions such as canthal tilt, jaw projection, mouth width and facial thirds, looksmaxxers also believe they can prove superiority or inferiority; only this time, it pertains to attractiveness.
In this day and age, science is widely regarded as an indisputable force. This works as a shield for the pseudoscience of looksmaxxing, where impressionable youth often believe wholeheartedly in the truth of objective attractiveness. The objective attractiveness found in looksmaxxing categorizes people into different levels: “subhuman” is the lowest, followed by “low-tier normie,” all the way up to “Stacy’s and Chad’s,” or extremely good-looking people.
To a normal person, these terminologies sound ridiculous. What this identifies is the level of disconnection with society that looksmaxxing promotes. It is an ideology that teaches us to ignore the humanity of a person, distancing ourselves from their actual existence and viewing them as we would on a screen. The intertwinement of real life and online is growing increasingly more difficult to separate, and it is exactly these movements disguised as inconsequential that worsen it.
