From Glow-Up to Looksmaxxing: There was a time when glow-up was about getting a haircut, dressing better, drinking more water because Instagram had convinced you that water was the answer to every problem, finding a new lipstick shade that suited you, starting to go to the gym, sleeping better, and doing something that made you feel good.
We Went From Glow-Up to Looksmaxxing
Someone somehow noticed that glow-up was never really about becoming a different person but about looking like a different version of yourself who had figured something out. Glow-up became self-improvement; self-improvement became optimisation; optimisation became facial analysis; facial analysis became jawlines, cheekbones, symmetry, eye shape, skin texture, and the eternal question of whether your face was “good enough”.
We eventually arrived at “looksmaxxing”. It did not appear suddenly because TikTok invented it, but the term emerged in the mid-2010s within male subculture forums before moving into mainstream internet culture. TikTok only gave the vocabulary a bigger, younger, visual and global audience.
First, We Wanted a Glow-Up
The internet’s early beauty culture was already training us to improve ourselves: Social Media gave us makeup tutorials, hair transformations, fitness videos, and skincare routines. Suddenly, beauty advice was arriving in fifteen-second packages. Ice your face; slugging; gua sha; face tapping; different kinds of sunscreen; contouring; haircut according to your face.
Nothing listed necessarily sounds terrifying: some are useful; some questionable; and some are simply trends. The bigger change happened in the minds, and once there is always something to improve, there is always something that can be wrong.
Face Then Apparently Became a Project
Somewhere along the line we perhaps stopped asking whether someone was attractive; we started asking why. Is it because of the jaw, cheekbones, nose, eyes, lips, skin, proportions, symmetry?
Social media made it incredibly easy to analyse faces: you could pause a video, zoom into someone’s features, compare and watch someone explain why one facial characteristic was more desirable than another. The mirror itself became interactive, and looksmaxxing took the obsession and gave it a name.
The word “maximise” seems important here. “Improve” suggests that there might eventually be a point when you would be happy, but while “maximising” there is always another level, perhaps. There would be another flaw to fix; another feature to sharpen; something to squeeze out of your appearance.
The American Academy of Paediatrics has discussed the rise of looksmaxxing among young people and even has a paper titled, “From Mewing to Peptides: Looksmaxxing as an Emerging Pediatric Concern”, which says, “Although the term emerged from online communities focused largely on male appearance and status, its core messages overlap with broader adolescent exposure to filtered images, cosmetic enhancement, fitness content, dieting advice, and algorithmically reinforced appearance comparison.”
Suddenly beauty could feel like an exam; perhaps your jawline was not sharp enough, the eyes were not of the “correct” shape, or the face was not in the right symmetry, cheekbones were not prominent. The face simply stopped being a face; it became a checklist.
Gym Entered the Chat
Optimisation travelled! The gym was always about strength, health and fitness, but social media increasingly made the body a visual: muscles, progress, before-and-after pictures became content.
The ideal body came with its own grammar, which started being followed. So the face and the body began speaking the same language: optimise, correct, enhance, repeat.
Softmaxxing, Then Hardmaxxing
Oh yes! Looksmaxxing split into its softer and more extreme versions.
Softmaxxing generally refers to the relatively conventional appearance-improvement practices like grooming, skincare, exercise, better clothing, haircuts, and sleep. Some of the practices associated are essentially ordinary self-care, wearing a very internet-specific name.
Then there is hardmaxxing, which moves towards more invasive or extreme attempts to change appearance, including cosmetic procedures and dangerous practices promoted in online communities. One such example is “bonesmashing”, the pseudoscientific idea of deliberately striking facial bones to alter their structure, which is a perhaps worrying transition.
Something can look less frightening when thousands of people are discussing it casually online: the language makes it sound like a hobby, and a community can make it sound normal.
Then Came Clavicular
Braden Eric Peters, known online as Clavicular, became one of the most recognisable public faces associated with looksmaxxing culture through TikTok and Kick.
What makes Clavicular culturally interesting is not simply that one influencer exists; it is that he represents what happens when looksmaxxing stops being a side interest and becomes an identity.
The body becomes “content”; transformations become the “product”, and this vocabulary becomes the entire world. His rise also shows how extreme appearance culture can become entertainment in itself: something that audiences watch, discuss and participate in rather than simply a private insecurity.
Clavicular is not where looksmaxxing began; he is just closer to what happens when the pointer is still there.
Insecurity Is Extremely Monetisable
This is the part we tend to forget when discussing beauty culture. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to look good; there is nothing wrong with skincare, working out, changing your hairstyle, dressing differently or choosing cosmetic procedures. The problem begins when appearance stops being one part of your life and becomes the entire measurement of it.
There is an entire economy waiting at the end of the sentence itself: if you think your skin is bad, there is a product; if your hair is thinning, there is a treatment; a supplement for your body; a procedure for your face. Everything has a “solution” marketed to people. The beauty industry has always understood the commercial value of insecurity, and social media made the mirror algorithmic by showing the “ideal”, creating the gap, selling the product and then showing another “ideal”.
We Need to Rethink the Glow-Up
Looksmaxxing did not invent the desire to improve ourselves: it inherited it from makeover, glow-up, fitness culture, filters, before-and-after pictures, every little promise that a better version of you is waiting for you.
The difference is that looksmaxxing gave the whole thing a vocabulary of maximum, which is not necessarily healthier, happier, or more confident, but just “more attractive”, “more symmetrical”, “more defined”, “more desirable”, “more acceptable”, and perhaps that is the real question. Why has self-improvement increasingly become something that needs to be visible before we consider it improvement at all?
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