Looksmaxxing
Aggressively optimizing one's appearance โ from skincare and gym work to fringe surgery โ as a project pursued mostly by young men on the internet.
Origin
Coined in the pickup-artist and incel forums of the late 2000s, the word combines 'looks' with the gamer suffix '-max' (to maximize a stat). It splits into 'softmaxxing' (haircuts, skincare, gym, mewing, posture) and 'hardmaxxing' (jaw surgery, leg-lengthening, steroids). TikTok pulled the term out of those forums in the early 2020s, where a softer, partly ironic version went mainstream among teenage boys. Bone-smashing, an extreme fringe variant where users hit their own faces to 'stress' the bone into reshaping, is medically nonsense and dangerous โ but went viral anyway.
Modern usage
Used neutrally on TikTok and skeptically (or worriedly) in journalism about young men. The most-cited example terms โ [[mewing]], 'canthal tilt', 'hunter eyes' โ all come out of the same subculture. A useful companion concept to [[the-secret]] and [[manifesting]]: where those try to think the outcome into being, looksmaxxing tries to grind it.
In the wild
Half his videos are workout tips; the other half are looksmaxxing routines.โ youth-culture reporting
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