Somewhere in your house tonight, a teenage boy might be measuring the angle of his eyes with an app.
Looksmaxxing means “maximising your looks,” and it’s one of the fastest-growing trends targeting teenage boys online. It started in the darkest corners of the internet, jumped to TikTok dressed up as self-improvement, and it now sits in the pocket of most boys in most Australian high schools. A 2025 Movember study found 68% of young Australian men regularly view masculinity content. 27% say it makes them feel worthless. Strip away the jargon and it’s a body image problem wearing a gym hoodie, the same crisis we’ve spent 20 years teaching girls to name, now showing up in boys who’ve never had the vocabulary for it.
Your son is not vain. He’s anxious, he’s disciplined, and he’s been sold a lie with a price tag attached. Here’s what you’re dealing with, and what to do about it.
What is looksmaxxing?
Looksmaxxing means maximising your looks. It’s a trend that tells teenage boys their face and body decide their worth, pushing jawline exercises, supplements, and expensive courses. It started in dark corners of the internet, spread through TikTok as self-improvement, and now reaches most boys in most Australian high schools.
In this article:
The vocabulary your son already knows
If any of these words have floated across your dinner table, this article is for you.
Mewing is pressing the tongue to the roof of the mouth all day to “restructure” the jawline. There’s no clinical evidence it works. Some boys stay silent through the school day to hold the posture.
Mogging means being visibly more attractive than someone, beating them on looks. Boys rank each other with it. Canthal tilt is the angle of the eyes, measured with an app, rated “hunter” or “prey.” Bonesmashing is hitting the face with hard objects to trigger bone growth. Yes, really.
Ascending is the goal all of it serves: climbing the tier list from “sub5” or “normie” up to “Chad,” through skin, gym, grooming, and jaw work. Every ritual in this glossary is one more rep towards ascending.
And then the phrase that should stop you cold: “it’s over.” It’s the verdict a boy hands himself when he decides he can’t ascend, that his genetics are wrong, so his life is finished at 15.
The blackpill
The boys call the belief underneath all of it the blackpill. Swallow it and you accept one claim as settled fact: looks decide everything, romance, respect, and status, and personality doesn’t move the number. It borrows its name and logic from the manosphere’s “red pill,” the idea that most people are living a comfortable lie and only a hard, uncomfortable truth will free them. The blackpill takes that structure and points it at the mirror. Where mewing and bonesmashing are rituals a boy performs, the blackpill is the verdict he’s already accepted before he starts, that his bone structure fixed his fate at birth and no amount of effort changes the outcome. A 2025 study analysing 8,000 comments on a looksmaxxing forum found body shame, black-market hormone purchases, and encouragement of self-harm. 58% of one major forum’s users were under 18.
The worldview underneath is genetic fatalism: your bones decide your future, effort is cosmetic. It is a direct attack on the one thing every young person needs most, the belief that their choices matter.
Who profits from your son’s body image
Here’s the question I’d want every parent to ask, because your son will respond to it better than any lecture: who gets paid when he feels ugly?
Two groups do. The platforms are the first. The feed is engineered with variable rewards, infinite scroll, and streaks, the same mechanics as a poker machine, because insecurity holds attention longer than contentment. Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke calls the result a dopamine economy. Your son’s attention is the product being sold.
The influencers are the second. One prominent looksmaxxing influencer sells a $49 “academy” teaching boys to fix their jawlines, hairlines, and height. Rolling Stone bought access and found pseudoscience wrapped in biochemical diagrams. Around him sits an entire economy of supplements, jaw trainers, and “glow up” courses.
That influencer has a name: Braden Peters, known online as Clavicular. On 14 April 2026 the 20-year-old was hospitalised in Miami after passing out mid-livestream, a suspected overdose on a cocktail of anxiety and party drugs he later said he was taking just to cope with being in public. He’s also been open for over a year about using steroids and crystal meth as part of his own looksmaxxing routine, the same practices he charges boys $49 to learn. After the hospital, he said he was done with substances altogether. The man charging boys $49 for the shortcut has been taking the same steroids and drugs himself for over a year, and it hasn’t fixed anything for him either.
The testosterone pipeline
Testosterone is the next rung on that ladder. University of Sydney researchers analysed 46 high-reach Instagram and TikTok posts pushing testosterone tests and treatment. The accounts behind them had 6.8 million followers combined and pulled more than 650,000 likes. The pattern is consistent: brand low testosterone as a crisis, aim it at young men chasing an unrealistic muscular ideal, and sell the fix as self-optimisation. What the posts leave out is the risk list: heart problems, infertility, kidney issues, blood clots.
The business model requires your son to stay insecure. A cured customer stops buying.
An old disease with a new product line
You met this machine before. It just sold different products.
Alain de Botton called it status anxiety: the fear of the judgement of strangers, the same fear that has your son checking how many likes a photo got before he’s out of bed. Juliet B. Schor spent years studying how marketers turned children into consumers on purpose. Her research names it the “nag factor”: the ad doesn’t bother convincing you. It convinces your kid, then sends him to convince you instead. You lived that as Saturday-morning cereal ads and the toy aisle meltdown at Kmart. Australian economists Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss called the adult version affluenza: bigger houses, smaller families, more debt, and a generation self-medicating against the emptiness underneath it.
The mechanism is always the same. Manufacture the insecurity, then sell the cure. Looksmaxxing points the same machine at your son’s face. The difference is dosage: Schor’s marketers needed Saturday-morning TV and got minutes a day. This version lives in his pocket, runs 24 hours a day, and knows his specific weak spot.
Your own scroll
Call it status sickness. The compulsive comparison of yourself to others, manufactured for profit.
It’s his disease and yours. Open your own phone and the same machine is running, just aimed at a different mirror. Your feed compares your renovation to next door’s, your career at 45 to a stranger’s at 30, your body to a highlight reel with the bad lighting cut out. The mechanics don’t change: manufacture the gap, then sell the course, the supplement, or the subscription that closes it.
That’s worth sitting with before you say a word to your son. You already know what it feels like to scroll past someone else’s best day and come away feeling smaller. He’s living the same loop, just pointed at his jawline instead of his job. Naming status sickness in yourself first is what makes the conversation land as understanding instead of a lecture.
Why looksmaxxing survives “get off your phone”
Australia’s under-16 social media ban has been in force since December 2025. By March 2026, government data showed more than 60% of under-16s were still on the platforms. The ban moved the furniture. The machine is still running, and every student turns 16.
The deeper problem is that willpower is the wrong weapon. Telling a 15-year-old to out-discipline a trillion-dollar industry employing the best behavioural scientists alive is a losing strategy. University of Melbourne researchers who analysed the actual TikTok histories of 142 young men found the pipeline starts innocently, with gym clips and fashion advice, then the algorithm escalates, because that’s what it’s built to do.
There’s one more trap. Looksmaxxing disguises itself as ambition. Your son experiences the routines and the tracking as discipline, so calling it an obsession bounces off. You can’t shame a boy out of something he’s proud of. You have to redirect it.
The 2 counter-moves
The research points to 2 things that work, and neither one is a screen-time setting.
Service. Appearance anxiety runs on rumination, the same looping self-focused thought that drives depression. Clinical researchers now build volunteering directly into treatment for adolescent depression, because shifting attention from self to others breaks the loop at the source. Obsession shrinks the world to a mirror. Service smashes the mirror. You can’t count your flaws while you’re carrying someone’s shopping.
Service also solves the status problem honestly. A boy who coaches juniors or packs crates at a food bank earns real status, conferred by people who know him, instead of an algorithm rating his bone structure.
Purpose. Stanford’s William Damon spent decades studying young people and found only 20% of under-26s can name a purpose that guides their choices. His conclusion: “The biggest problem growing up today is not actually stress; it’s meaninglessness.” That 80% vacuum is the market looksmaxxing sells into. A boy with nothing to optimise will optimise his face, because the feed told him it’s the only variable that matters.
Feed the right wolf
There’s an old parable about a boy who tells his grandfather he feels like 2 wolves are fighting inside him. One wolf is envy, comparison, and rage. The other is patience, service, and purpose.
“Which wolf wins?” the boy asks. “The one you feed,” the grandfather says.
Looksmaxxing feeds one wolf, dozens of times an hour, through an algorithm built to make sure it’s never full. The maxxing instinct itself was never the problem. It’s just been feeding the wrong animal.
So keep the vocabulary and change the target. The maxxing instinct, measure it, track it, improve it, compound it, is a real strength. It’s just pointed at a worthless race right now. Redirect it and the same instinct builds a different boy.
Skillmaxxing: track hours on the guitar or the free-throw line instead of hours spent mewing. Servicemaxxing: log volunteer shifts the way he logs reps at the gym. Coursemaxxing: stack certificates and real skills the way he’d stack supplements. Fulfillmentmaxxing: check in on how a purpose feels 6 months in, the way an app checks his jawline today.
The discipline he already shows chasing a symmetrical face is the exact skill set purpose requires. He doesn’t need new discipline. He needs a new scoreboard.
Start this week
Three moves, all doable before Sunday.
- Ask, don’t lecture. When the vocabulary surfaces, ask one question: “What does the seller earn if you believe your face is broken?” Boys hate being played far more than they hate being lectured. Show him the machine and let him judge it.
- Get him serving. One real commitment this week, with his name and his hands. Rumination can’t survive contact with other people’s needs.
- Help him pick his real max. One thing worth optimising that an app can’t measure, and the first rep he’ll do within 7 days.
I’ve built a free 2-page conversation map for parents: the 5 phrases boys use, what each one means, what to say, and what to ask instead. Print it, stick it on the fridge, and start the conversation this week.
If you’re the teacher, not just the parent
If you’re a teacher or wellbeing lead reading this, the pattern isn’t only a home problem. A boy who’s spent a year ranking faces and bodies online turns up to school with a warped read on status, and on respect. Character work has to compete with the feed, and the feed doesn’t clock off at 3:30pm.
That’s the gap Men of Honour was built to close. It’s our boys education program on respect and consent: 2 hours, boys only, straight talk instead of a slideshow. Schools book it as a respectful relationships program for a whole year level, or as a standalone consent education incursion when the timetable’s tight. Either way, it’s the same argument this article makes, just delivered live and loud: the discipline is already in him. Give him something real to point it at, and he’ll show you what healthy masculinity actually looks like in a Year 10 boy.
The person telling your son his face is wrong is the same person selling him the fix. He deserves to know that. You’re the one who gets to tell him.
Questions parents ask
What does looksmaxxing mean?
Looksmaxxing means maximising your looks. It’s a trend telling teenage boys their face and body decide their worth, and it spreads mainly through TikTok.
Why do teenage boys fall for it?
A 2025 Movember study found 68% of young Australian men regularly view masculinity content, and 27% say it makes them feel worthless. Boys are getting the same body image pressure girls have faced for 20 years, without the vocabulary to name it.
Who profits from looksmaxxing?
Two groups: the platforms, whose feeds use variable rewards and infinite scroll to hold attention, and influencers who sell courses, supplements, and jaw trainers built on pseudoscience.
What can parents do this week?
Ask instead of lecture (“what does the seller earn if you believe your face is broken?”), get him serving others, and help him pick a real skill to chase instead of a jawline.