The objectives of looksmaxxing are nothing new. Women have spent centuries maximising their physical attractiveness – through cosmetic, fitness and, more recently, surgical practices – to conform to mainstream beauty ideals. What is new is that men are now doing it, and talking about it, to the same extremes.

The goal of looksmaxxing is to glow up – but in a butch way. Rather than acknowledge that they’re mirroring behaviours women have long been pressured into, looksmaxxers distance themselves from femininity by tackling their insecurities through “science” and systems. Want to figure out if you’re attractive? You don’t have to guess! Simply calculate your canthal tilt, interpupillary distance and midface ratio. You can then assess yourself using a rating system like the eight-point PSL scale, which sorts men into three tiers. Once rated, you’ll be given advice on improving your sexual market value (SMV), perhaps by snatching your face with “Zygopush” facial exercises.

Through hypermasculine language, economics-based metaphors, (pseudo)science and the championing of unregulated or anti-establishment approaches, men seek to distance themselves “from practices culturally coded as feminine – and therefore ‘vain’ and ‘frivolous,’” as Brynn Valentine wrote in a recent Dazed article. Looksmaxxers reframe their mission to “fix” their insecurities as a serious clinical imperative, rather than a “superficial” desire to look hotter. Ugliness becomes a moral failing that must be rectified by any means necessary – even if those means involve using meth to lose weight or injecting dissolvable collagen threads into your penis. The goal is not to feel better about yourself, or even to attract the opposite sex, but to become an optimum humanoid. “When you actually know the objective measurements, it doesn’t become about sexual attraction; it’s about mathematics,” Clavicular stated on a podcast.

Men rebranded beauty practices and their vernacular. But although looksmaxxing was born from the manosphere, it has since broken into the mainstream – and is now increasingly being sold back to, and adopted by, women. While they may not be hitting their faces with hammers to alter their bone structure (yet), many of the telltale signs have begun to appear. FYPs and Discords are increasingly filled with female creators sharing facial exercises designed to improve features like the orbicularis oculi (eye muscles, for the non-Latin speakers among us) and a recessed maxilla (the bone in your face that encompasses the upper jaw, cheeks and under-eyes). Some swap tips on “corsetmaxxing”, while others speak like post-war eugenicists: “Me feeling insecure then remembering I have a north atlantid phenotype” (AKA being white). Even the pick-me girls sound different; it’s no longer “here’s why girls hate me”, but “I mog your side profile tho”.

Mala, a 26-year-old TikTok creator, started dabbling in looksmaxxing content and terminology in an attempt to be taken “more seriously” in the beauty sphere. “I have no problem with men enhancing their looks; it’s natural to seek validation and admiration in that department, but why are women being treated so poorly for wanting those same things?” she says. “When women care about their beauty, they are shallow and stupid, but if a man does, it’s self-care and improvement. Looksmaxxing is men once again taking over women’s spaces and claiming to have discovered them while also actively trying to kick us out.” 

Having noticed that people pay attention when minor cosmetic insecurities are framed as medical anomalies, women are adopting clinical, science-adjacent language to legitimise their beauty practices. Filming a vlog about getting lip filler may be dismissed as frivolous, but doing facial exercises to improve your maxilla suddenly sounds like a medically necessary endeavour. Is it any surprise, then, that women have begun to adopt this “masculine” verbiage? “It’s interesting to see what gets deemed as vanity and what gets lauded as biohacking,” says Ellen Atlanta, beauty critic and author of Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women. As an example, she points to anti-ageing, which has been rebranded as longevity science since men like Bryan Johnson became involved.

“It’s understandable why women would want to take on this language but it’s a strange bargain because it concedes that beauty work only becomes serious when it stops sounding like something women do. The labour hasn’t changed. And most people can’t actually afford to do the more scientific or experimental treatments.” 

Dr Jordan Foster, assistant professor in the Sociology Department at MacEwan University, also believes women are turning to the language of looksmaxxing because it is “strategically wise” to do so. “It may be a shortcut for women [...] who have always commented on beauty, but whose dialogue has gone without notice until now,” he says. Until very recently, beauty culture was viewed as women’s business and, therefore, as trite. “I think it is important to recognise that matters related to femininity are often dismissed as silly. For evidence of this, you can look to a range of women’s health issues that have been neglected by the press, by members of the public and by physicians and researchers alike. Beauty is not so different,” he says.

There’s no ‘right’ way to feel bad about yourself. The scene in Mean Girls where the Plastics critically dissect their bodies wouldn’t be any worse if Gretchen bemoaned her long philtrum rather than her hairline. The problem is that this shift legitimises the more clinical and frankly dystopian way men talk about their appearance. By adopting this tech-bro language to describe our bodies, we risk reinforcing the idea that women must adopt more masculine behaviours to be taken seriously. Vanity becomes optimisation, insecurity becomes diagnosis, and beauty becomes just another problem to be solved. The vocabulary may have changed, but the demand remains the same: identify every possible perceived flaw, then fix it.