Chiselled jaws, pouty lips, hunter eyes: everything is up for grabs in the quest to increase ‘sexual market value’. But how did this extreme cosmetic craze become mainstream?
For James, it started with muscles. He was about 16 and had become self-conscious about his physique, fearing that he wasn’t buff enough to attract girls. He found his way to a bodybuilding forum and began to work out. He can’t remember when it happened, but at some point trolls began to infiltrate the forum. They were visitors from another online community with a different focus.
“Their general vibe was quite mean,” says James, who prefers not to use his real name. “They’d take images people had posted of their impressive physiques and be like: ‘You guys forgot to work out your faces!’”
Despite the meanness, curiosity pushed James over to the forums, which were largely focused on facial aesthetics. He discovered a new world in which mainly young men and teenage boys scoured pictures of each other for perceived flaws and purported fixes.
The forums hummed with brutal judgment and offered James a compelling new outlet for his insecurities. “I was learning about problems I hadn’t even noticed,” he says. “I had a short face and a short chin, my nose was too wide, my eyes were too far apart, my hairline was too high … You don’t see a lot of these things until someone else points them out and then you can’t stop seeing them.”
James had become hooked on looksmaxxing, an online community of people seeking to enhance their faces. He began to learn a strange code that members used to compare their characteristics: IPDs (interpupillary distance, the gap between the eyes); canthal tilt (the angles of the eyes); mewing (a tongue exercise that supposedly improves the shape of the jaw). “The ultimate goal is to improve your SMV,” says James. Sexual market value, that is.
Looksmaxxing, or to looksmax, is a practice involving several forms of body care routines, in an effort to improve one’s physical appearance. While the practice as a whole can refer to simple hygiene, more extreme methods have become associated with looksmaxxing, such as “mewing.” The practice is affiliated with incel subculture, and originated on “manosphere” message boards. The practice became a TikTok trend, and became popular amongst mostly teenagers in the 2020s.