LOOKSMAXING

Straight Men Have Discovered Moisturizer And Are Calling It Sexual Strategy.

Mar 01, 2026

IF I HAD A HAMMER :: Somewhere in the world right now, a young straight man is lightly tapping his cheekbones with a hammer. He’s “bone smashing” in the name of beauty, and videos with the phrase “bone smashing tutorial” have already garnered over 267.7 million views on TikTok.

It’s part of a movement called “looksmaxing.”

It may sound like a discontinued energy drink but looksmaxing is actually a burgeoning online subculture of young straight guys devoted to optimizing their male attractiveness through geometry, facial measurements, cosmetic procedures, ritualized self-surveillance — and the occasional light home improvement-like project on one’s own skull.

The goal? To increase “sexual market value.” So to “slay” - bed women.

I repeat: Sexual. Market. Value.

Like your face is going public and women are shareholders.

In the world of looksmaxing, jawlines are measured in precise degrees. Canthal tilt — the angle between the inner and outer corners of the eye — is dissected like forensic evidence. (Outer corner higher? Positive tilt. Alpha. Outer corner lower? Negative tilt. Beta. We are, apparently, one PowerPoint slide away from grading our nostrils.)

So if a looksmaxer’s flirting with the opposite sex fails, it isn’t that chemistry wasn’t there. It’s “midface ratio collapse.”

Looksmaxing has now been profiled by the relevance thirsty publications GQ and The New York Times, which means it has officially migrated from basement forums to cultural trend piece. Its most photogenic ambassador is 19-year-old influencer Clavicular, née Braden Peters, fluent in the language of optimization. He teaches young men to curl their eye lashes for positive canthal tilt, apply eyeliner and eyedrops, measure their faces with grids and ratios, transforming their adolescence into a facial analytics internship.

Looksmaxing is straight men inventing a permission structure to care about how they look without feeling feminine… or gay.

Clavicular’s face is not something to be enjoyed. It is something to be engineered.

Online forums discuss “bone remodeling.” Cheekbones are tapped to stimulate growth. (Somewhere, a Sephora employee just whispered, “We could have just started with concealer.”)

But here’s the disturbing part we’re supposed to ignore:

Looksmaxing doesn’t exist in isolation. It lives in the same algorithmic ecosystem as incel grievance forums, “red pill” masculinity coaches (who allege society is feminist-dominated and oppressive to men) and evolutionary-psychology evangelists who believe women are biologically programmed to pursue only the top 10 percent of men, a statistic that exists primarily in the imaginations of men who spend a lot of time online.

The language overlaps: “High value male.” “Sexual marketplace.” “Hypergamy.”
“Dominance hierarchy.”

This is not Clinique bonus week skincare, it’s ideology mixed in toner.

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In the looksmaxing ecosystem, women are framed not as people but as reward systems. Desire becomes transactional. Romance becomes competitive ranking. If a woman isn’t interested, the system must be rigged. The culture must be corrupted; feminism must be to blame. The solution is not empathy or emotional growth, god forbid, it’s sharper cheekbone angles.

And here is the quiet, almost tragic truth I’ve yet to hear anyone say: Looksmaxing is straight men inventing a permission structure to care about how they look without feeling feminine… or gay.

For centuries gay men have moisturized, groomed, tailored, manscaped, and obsessed over jawlines without convening a summit on dominance theory. We used serums without invoking Darwin. We understood good lighting without citing hierarchy charts.

We wanted to look good. That was all. We called it “getting ready,” and we did it with music playing.

But in looksmaxing culture, desire must be reframed as strategy. You cannot simply want to be attractive. You must be optimizing your rank. You cannot just contour. You are increasing competitive leverage.

It’s RuPaul’s Drag Race with spreadsheets.

And what makes it bleak — beyond the hammer — is the joylessness of it. There is no play here. No sensuality. No camp. No pleasure in the ritual. Only audit.

The mirror becomes a performance review. The body becomes a quarterly earnings report. Masculinity becomes a construction site, with safety goggles and grievance.

In trying to escape being judged, these men have made themselves permanent contestants. They didn’t dismantle the gaze, they internalized it.

The cruelty of incel-adjacent thinking has always been this: it tells men they are victims of a rigged system while simultaneously convincing them that love is a prize awarded for technical superiority. It trains them to see rejection not as incompatibility, but as injustice.

So they measure. They rank. They calculate. They… hammer.

Because anger feels sturdier than vulnerability.

But here’s the nuclear part:

If you believe women are shallow evaluators scanning for jawline equity, you don’t actually want intimacy. You want compliance. You want confirmation that you won the algorithm.

And that isn’t attraction.

That’s authoritarianism with moisturizer.

Looksmaxers didn’t discover beauty, they discovered anxiety with better lighting and wrapped it in hierarchy theory so they wouldn’t have to admit they just want to look their best and desired. Just like women, and gay men do too. Like we all do.

The real glow-up for looksmaxers won’t be sharper cheekbones, it’ll be learning that you don’t need to dominate a marketplace to be wanted by another human being.

And if your masculinity can’t survive owning a tube of moisturizer without building a manifesto around it?

The problem isn’t your canthal tilt.

It’s the hammer.

Shaun Proulx

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