Patrick Bateman wakes up, dons a cooling gel eye mask, drops to the floor for 1,000 crunches, and proceeds to walk the audience through a nine-step skincare routine in forensic detail. It is 2000. The film is American Psycho. The joke, supposedly, is that a serial killer is this obsessed with his pores.
Twenty-five years later, that scene has been watched over 17 million times on YouTube. It has been dissected in TikTok edits, repurposed into GRWM (Get Ready With Me) content, and held up (completely unironically) as a blueprint. Not a warning. A blueprint.
That tells you almost everything you need to know about looksmaxxing.
What Is Looksmaxxing?
Looksmaxxing, a portmanteau of “looks” and “maximizing”, refers to the systematic pursuit of physical attractiveness through whatever means necessary.
At its most benign, that means skincare and going to the gym. At its most extreme, it means bone-restructuring surgery, anabolic steroids, and practices that medical professionals have publicly condemned as dangerous.
The term originated in the early 2010s on incel (involuntary celibate) message boards like Lookism.net, where it existed as niche forum language exchanged between men who believed romantic failure was primarily a physical problem.
By 2022 and 2023 it had exploded onto TikTok, where the hashtag #looksmaxxing has accumulated over 2 billion views.
Today the term has bled so thoroughly into mainstream culture that people use “mogged,” “mewing,” and “SMV” in comment sections without even clocking that the vocabulary came from one of the internet’s more troubled corners.
Dr. Jamilla Rosdahl, a senior lecturer at the Australian College of Applied Psychology, summarised the psychological draw with precision: young people who feel they cannot control their environment may turn to looksmaxxing as something they can control.
In an era of economic instability, post-pandemic anxiety, and an increasingly brutal dating landscape for young men, the appeal is easy to understand.
Appearance feels manageable in a way that geopolitics and the housing market does not.
The Looksmaxxing Spectrum: From Softmaxxing to Hardmaxxing
The community draws a firm line between two broad categories of practice.
Softmaxxing occupies the benign end: consistent skincare routines, regular gym attendance, better nutrition, improved grooming, experimenting with haircuts, and learning which clothing actually fits your body. Many of these would simply be called “self-care” in any other context.
The most discussed softmaxxing technique is mewing, a set of tongue posture exercises supposedly capable of sharpening jawline definition over time.
Orthodontist Dr. John Mew developed the underlying concept of orthotropics decades ago, though he never intended it to become a TikTok phenomenon.
Most mainstream dentists are sceptical about dramatic results, but the practice itself is harmless.
Softmaxxing is not really the issue. If a 17-year-old starts moisturising and sleeping eight hours because of looksmaxxing content, that is not a crisis. The problem is that the softmaxxing pipeline does not always stay soft.
Hardmaxxing is where things deteriorate rapidly. This end of the spectrum encompasses cosmetic surgery specifically sought for aesthetic maximisation, the use of anabolic steroids to accelerate muscle growth, extreme caloric restriction (sometimes called starvemaxxing), and the genuinely dangerous practice of bonesmashing, in which individuals intentionally strike their face against hard surfaces in the belief that the resulting micro-fractures will heal into a more pronounced bone structure.
No credible medical evidence supports bonesmashing. Multiple doctors and surgeons have publicly condemned it. It persists regardless.
Paediatrician Dr. Milan Agrawal has stated that looksmaxxing practices are contributing to disordered eating among teenage boys, a demographic that eating disorder services have historically underserved and underdiagnosed.
The Patrick Bateman Problem: When Pop Culture Became the Manual
Here is where things get interesting for a music and pop culture publication, because looksmaxxing does not exist in a cultural vacuum. It draws heavily and explicitly from a specific aesthetic, and that aesthetic has a very specific soundtrack.
Patrick Bateman is looksmaxxing’s unofficial patron saint. His morning routine, his obsession with physical perfection, his careful curation of consumer goods, including his music taste, which mirrors the looksmaxxing mentality with unsettling accuracy.
The scene most often repurposed by the community is Bateman’s opening monologue, where he describes cleansing, toning, and moisturising with the focused intensity of a military briefing.
What the community tends to omit is that Bret Easton Ellis and director Mary Harron created Bateman specifically to satirise this kind of man. His relationship with music is the most revealing detail.
Bateman does not love Phil Collins or Whitney Houston because their music moves him emotionally. He loves them because they have the highest chart positions, the most units sold, the safest cultural real estate.
His taste is a spreadsheet. He is, as one critic put it, the algorithm before the algorithm existed.
As PopMatters observed in a 2025 analysis of the film’s soundtrack, Bateman processes music statistically, praising Whitney Houston for her four number-one singles rather than for the feeling in her voice. Popularity is the only metric of value. If it is trending, it must be right.
That logic of appearance as metrics, taste as status signalling, self-worth as a quantifiable score: this is precisely the logic that animates the more toxic corners of looksmaxxing culture.
The community did not just accidentally stumble onto Bateman; it recognised itself in him.
CNN noted in a 25th anniversary retrospective on the film that many young men today “are circling around the same preoccupations that Bateman did,” treating looksmaxxing like the modern equivalent of those infamous business card scenes, a competition to dominate through surfaces.
The Joker has served a similar function. Where Bateman represents aspirational dominance, the Joker represents the grievance narrative, the figure who was rejected by society and whose violence is framed as a response to that rejection.
Both characters are celebrated within certain looksmaxxing communities not as cautionary tales but as archetypes worth emulating.
This is not a small thing. When a subculture’s primary pop culture touchstones are a satirised serial killer and a symbol of nihilistic violence, the subculture is telling you something about itself.
The Incel Overlap: How a Beauty Trend Acquired an Ideology
Looksmaxxing’s incel roots are not ancient history. They are the soil the tree is still growing in.
The incel (involuntary celibate) ideology holds, in crude terms, that male romantic failure is caused by genetics and physical appearance rather than behaviour or circumstance, and that women are complicit in this injustice.
It is a worldview that has been connected to real-world violence multiple times. Its overlap with looksmaxxing is not incidental; looksmaxxing emerged from within incel forums as a proposed solution to the problem those forums diagnosed.
Within these spaces, individuals are rated on their Sexual Market Value (SMV), a numerical score assigned entirely on the basis of physical appearance.
Those who receive low scores are frequently subjected to harassment and, in documented cases, encouragement to engage in self-harm.
A 2021 research report found that young YouTube users can be served incel-adjacent content within five algorithmic hops from entirely neutral starting videos.
It is important to note that looksmaxxing and incel culture are not synonymous. Many people engage in softmaxxing without subscribing to any toxic ideology.
But the vocabulary, the community infrastructure, and the underlying logic of “fix your looks, fix your life” carry ideological baggage that casual participants may not be fully aware of when they download the app or join the subreddit.
Controversial figures like Andrew Tate have exploited this gateway effectively, blending self-improvement language with misogynistic ideology in a way that is deliberately designed to be accessible before it becomes extreme.
The Music Connection Goes Deeper Than Bateman
The looksmaxxing aesthetic does not just reference American Psycho; it has also absorbed a broader strain of music culture that romanticises a particular image of cold, dominant masculinity.
The “sigma male” archetype so prevalent in looksmaxxing communities has its own soundtrack, visible in TikTok edits: dark, ominous phonk music, hard trap, or 80s synth-pop repurposed as a backdrop for before-and-after transformation videos.
Artists like The Weeknd, with his recurring themes of hedonism, physical obsession, and emotional detachment, have been adopted into the aesthetic without necessarily endorsing it.
Darker still, certain phonk tracks have become synonymous with looksmaxxing content specifically because their sound communicates cold efficiency, the idea of appearance as a project to be optimised rather than a human experience to be inhabited.
There is an irony here that is very much worth naming. Bateman’s relationship with music was hollow precisely because he treated it as a status commodity rather than something felt.
The looksmaxxing community has done the same thing to music that Bateman did: used it as wallpaper for an image, drained it of its emotional content, and left the aesthetic intact.
The Psychological Toll
The mental health implications of looksmaxxing have been documented by researchers and clinicians consistently enough to constitute a consensus.
Dr. Agrawal’s warning about disordered eating in teenage boys is part of a broader pattern.
Body dysmorphic disorder, a condition in which a person becomes obsessively preoccupied with perceived physical flaws, is significantly underdiagnosed in men, partly because the symptoms often manifest through behaviours (excessive gym attendance, restrictive eating, cosmetic procedures) that society is more likely to praise than flag.
A 2024 BBC report found that looksmaxxing practices are actively contributing to body dysmorphia diagnoses.
The rating culture within hardmaxxing communities compounds this considerably. When a person’s worth is assigned a number and that number is used to determine whether they deserve to exist in a social space, the psychological damage can be severe and lasting.
Rosdahl’s research notes that incel and looksmaxxing content can be served to users on multiple platforms (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) within minutes of engaging with the initial material, creating an algorithmic feedback loop that accelerates exposure to increasingly extreme content before a user fully understands the ecosystem they have entered.
If you or someone you know is struggling with body image or disordered eating, the National Eating Disorders helpline and Mind UK both offer support.
Is There a Healthy Version of Looksmaxxing?
Yes, and it deserves acknowledgement.
The instinct to take better care of your appearance is neither new nor harmful. Consistent sleep, regular exercise, decent skincare, and clothes that actually fit are not controversial self-improvement activities.
For young men who grew up in households where grooming was never discussed, looksmaxxing content, at its most benign, has genuinely provided accessible, practical information that helped them feel more confident.
The question is always the pipeline. Softmaxxing is a door. The issue is what is on the other side of it when the algorithms kick in.
The healthier version of this impulse looks like: taking care of your physical health because you respect your body, not because you are trying to hit a numerical attractiveness score.
Building confidence from your capabilities and relationships, not exclusively from how you look in a selfie.
Understanding that the “hunter eyes” ideal, the specific configuration of brow, canthal tilt, and hollow cheeks that the community has decided constitutes maximum male attractiveness, which is not a universal standard. It is a narrow, culturally specific preference that has been mistaken for objective truth.
Looksmaxxing and the Beauty Industry
The beauty industry’s response to looksmaxxing has been predictably commercial. Skincare lines have pivoted to market themselves with looksmaxxing-adjacent language.
Surgical procedures that once sat firmly in niche aesthetic medicine are now discussed in mainstream content as routine optimisation tools.
The ethical problem is clear: some brands are profiting directly from the insecurities these communities generate and amplify.
The blurring of genuine product advice with sponsored looksmaxxing content, often without adequate disclosure, which raises real transparency concerns that consumer protection bodies are still catching up to.
At the same time, the increased male engagement with skincare is, in isolation, not a bad thing. Men’s skincare was historically underserved and under-normalised.
The problem is when the entry point to that engagement is a community that simultaneously tells young men they are objectively subhuman for having the wrong eye shape.
The Looksmaxxing Lexicon: Key Terms Explained
Softmaxxing
Low-risk, non-invasive appearance improvements: skincare, fitness, grooming, fashion.
Hardmaxxing
Invasive, high-risk interventions: surgery, steroids, extreme dietary restriction.
Mewing
Tongue posture exercises aimed at improving jawline definition, derived from orthotropic principles.
Bonesmashing
Deliberately striking the face to supposedly reshape bone structure. Widely condemned by medical professionals. Not effective.
Starvemaxxing
Extreme caloric restriction to achieve a target physique. Associated with male eating disorder development.
Mogging
Asserting visual dominance over another person by being perceived as more attractive.
Hunter Eyes
A specific eye shape (positive canthal tilt, limited upper eyelid exposure, low-set brows) treated within the community as the ideal of male attractiveness. Popularised partly by the idolisation of model Jordan Barrett.
SMV (Sexual Market Value)
A numerical rating of attractiveness used within certain communities to rank individuals. Deeply connected to incel ideology.
Whitemaxxing
The use of topical products to achieve a lighter skin tone. One of the more openly racist strands of hardmaxxing.
Facial Gains
The cumulative visual improvements resulting from looksmaxxing practices.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is looksmaxxing harmful?
It depends entirely on where on the spectrum someone lands. Basic grooming, fitness, and skincare are not harmful. The extreme end, including bonesmashing, starvemaxxing, steroid use, and the psychological impact of SMV rating culture, carries significant documented risks to both physical and mental health.
Is looksmaxxing just for men?
No, though it originated in male spaces and remains predominantly male-coded. The practices exist across genders; the specific community infrastructure and ideology is far more developed on the male side.
What is the difference between softmaxxing and hardmaxxing?
Softmaxxing covers non-invasive changes achievable through routine and lifestyle. Hardmaxxing involves invasive procedures, pharmaceutical enhancement, or practices with significant medical risk.
Is mewing real?
The underlying principle of tongue posture influencing facial development has some academic basis in orthodontics. As a dramatic physical transformation tool for adults, the evidence is thin. It is not harmful in the way bonesmashing is.
How does looksmaxxing connect to incel culture?
Looksmaxxing emerged directly from incel message boards and retains shared vocabulary, communities, and ideology with that subculture. Not everyone who engages in looksmaxxing is an incel, but the pipeline from casual softmaxxing content to more extreme incel-adjacent spaces is well-documented and algorithmically facilitated.
Patrick Bateman tells his secretary: “You can always be thinner, look better.” He means it as seduction. Ellis and Harron intended it as horror. The fact that the line now circulates as motivational content says something not just about looksmaxxing, but about how thoroughly we have lost the thread between the satire and the thing it was satirising.
Wanting to look your best is human. Building a numerical system to rank your worth, idolising fictional psychopaths as aesthetic role models, and striking your own face against a wall in pursuit of a jawline: that is something else entirely. The gap between those two things is where looksmaxxing lives, and understanding it honestly requires holding both ends of the spectrum in your head at the same time.