There's been a boom in the number of searches for 'looksmaxxing', and if you want to prove you're down with the kids, you might want to know what this latest phenomenon is and how it's taking over social media.
In the aftermath of Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, there's been increased debate about the supposed incel culture and the young men who are easily influenced by what they're seeing online.
The likes of Andrew Tate are seen as proponents of the manosphere, but as an offshoot of this potentially toxic culture, looksmaxxers are a whole different beast. At the forefront of the lookmaxxers, names including Androgenic and Braden "Clavicular" Peters are constantly doing the rounds, with both recently being in the news over the latter's apparent overdose at a bar in Miami.
Clavicular continues to amass a huge following but divides opinions, although he doesn't seem to enjoy being compared to Tate after walking out of an interview. Among the most concerning aspects of looksmaxxing are those that take things to the extreme with 'hardmaxxing'.
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This involves methods like starvemaxxing, roidmaxxing, and edging to supposedly boost testosterone by avoiding ejaculation. Easily the most controversial is 'bone smashing', where influencers are said to purposefully break their own bones in hopes of them growing back stronger and giving them a more defined facial structure.
Clavicular claims he's taken part in bone smashing to get his chiselled look with a hammer, but as Dr Baldeep Farmah warns us, it seems there's more to the story. As an aesthetic surgeon at Dr Aesthetica, Farmah revealed the truth behind looksmaxxing to UNILADTech.
With reports that searches for looksmaxxing have soared by 376% on Google Trends, we asked Farmah if we're at a 'pandemic' level of young men adopting these aesthetic extremes. While Farmah said he wouldn't use the word pandemic lightly, he explained: "I do think the influence is broader than most people realise, partly because it's happening quite quietly through algorithms."
Pointing the finger of blame at social media platforms where looksmaxxers are only growing in popularity, Farmah added: "A young man doesn't have to go looking for this content; it finds him. What I notice in the clinic is that patients are arriving with much more specific, researched requests than they used to.
"That tells me something is shaping those expectations, and social media is the obvious common thread."
When asked about the surge in searches for 'bonesmashing' in particular, and whether there's method to this madness, Farmah said that he suspects a lot of what's being shared online is performance rather than reality.
Reminding us that you don't need a medical degree to realize hitting yourself in the face with an object is a bad idea, he reiterated: "From a clinical standpoint, the premise has no basis in reality. Bone remodelling is a slow, complex biological process, and blunt trauma isn't going to sculpt your jawline, it's going to hurt you."
Even though Farmah isn’t sure whether the likes of Clavicular are actually taking these drastic steps, he said: "Whether people are genuinely doing this or whether it's mostly online bravado, I honestly couldn't say."
Even though bonesmashing might feel like it's the most intense aspect of looksmaxxing, Farmah suggested it's part of a much bigger issue: "To me, the extreme doesn't always look dramatic from the outside. Someone pursuing cheap, unregulated treatment, or following random advice from an online source, with no research, credentials, or regulation, is what I consider to be an extreme method in itself."
Saying this is the true underlying problem that we need to be aware of, Farmah concluded that it's "not the individual methods themselves, but how people are learning and being exposed to these methods."
While the looksmaxxers online claim they get their 'perfect' look from injecting, starving, and smashing, there's a continued cloud of misinformation as young viewers are in danger of adopting these unregulated practices for themselves.