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Looksmaxxing Is Selling Young Men a Lie. Character Is What Actually Gets You Loved.
Hammers to the cheekbones, AI face scores and steroid regimens are promising lonely young men a shortcut to love. The research points somewhere far less dramatic: kindness, curiosity and the way you treat people. Somewhere right now, a teenage boy is pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth, convinced it will rebuild his jaw. Another is uploading a selfie to an app that will score his cheekbones, his “masculinity” and his skin out of 10. A few, egged on by strangers online, are tapping their own faces with hammers in the hope of cracking the bone into something sharper. This is looksmaxxing, the online subculture that treats a young man’s face as a problem to be optimized. It has its own vocabulary: “softmaxxing” for haircuts and skin care, “hardmaxxing” for surgery, steroids and worse. It has its own heroes and its own grim math, in which a few millimeters of jawline decide whether you’ll ever be loved. It is also, at its core, a sad response to a real problem, and it’s pointed in the wrong direction. The damage Doctors are sounding the alarm. Dr. Jasmine Reese, who directs the adolescent and young adult clinic at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, has described a “huge uptick” in teens, including pre-teens, with eating disorders and body dysmorphia. She warns that AI rating apps can make vulnerable kids feel worse and push them toward dangerous experiments. Influencers in the space push anabolic steroids, experimental peptides bought online and stimulants for weight loss. Bone smashing, the practice of repeatedly striking the cheeks and jaw to cause tiny fractures, is “one of the most concerning practices in the looksmaxxing subculture,” according to UT Southwestern Medical Center. It can cause fat necrosis and permanent bone damage, leaving a disfigured face instead of a chiseled one, and kick off years of corrective procedures. Mewing, the tongue trick, has no solid scientific evidence behind it. Underneath all of it is real pain. In 2023, 28% of male high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, up from 21% a decade earlier, according to CDC data. Up to 80% of adolescent boys report being unhappy with their bodies. Looksmaxxing didn’t create that loneliness. It just found a way to sell to it. What people actually want Here’s the cruel irony. The movement promises that looks are destiny in dating, and the research keeps saying otherwise. In one of the largest studies of mate preferences ever done, psychologist David Buss surveyed more than 10,000 people across 37 cultures in the late 1980s. Men and women alike ranked being kind and understanding, and being intelligent, at or near the top of what they wanted in a partner, ahead of good looks. Newer work points the same way. A recent study of 778 Brazilian adults published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior asked people to spend a limited “budget” on the traits they wanted most in a partner: intelligence, kindness, physical attractiveness, health and money. Across genders and sexual orientations, intelligence and kindness came out on top. The more points people had to spend, the more they put into kindness and intelligence, and the less looks and money mattered. “Intelligence and kindness are the most desired traits of a partner, even in comparison to beauty, money or health,” the lead author, João Takayanagi, said. “Intelligence and kindness are the most desired traits of a partner, even in comparison to beauty, money or health.” — João Takayanagi, University of São Paulo Looks aren’t irrelevant. The same study found heterosexual men placed more weight on physical attractiveness than other groups, and anyone who has used a dating app knows a photo opens the door. But a photo is a first impression. A relationship is everything that happens after it. Character changes what people see Personality doesn’t just compete with looks. It changes how looks are perceived. In a study published in the journal Personal Relationships, psychologist Gary Lewandowski Jr. had people rate the attractiveness of strangers from photos, then rate them again after learning about their personalities. People described as honest and helpful were suddenly rated as better looking. People described as rude or unfair were rated as less attractive, no matter how good their photos were. “Personality goes a long way toward determining your attractiveness,” Lewandowski said. A British study led by Daniel Farrelly of the University of Worcester found something similar. Researchers showed 202 women photos of men paired with short stories: some men helped someone, from buying coffee for a homeless person to saving a child from a river, while others refused to help. The kind men were rated as more attractive, and for long-term relationships, altruism mattered more than good looks. “Being altruistic is better than being attractive for long-term relationships,” Farrelly said. There was a catch worth being honest about: women looking for a fling rated the selfish men as more desirable. Looksmaxxing culture tends to stop right there. But most people aren’t looking for a weekend. They’re looking for a person. What makes love last The psychologist John Gottman spent decades watching couples interact, and his findings had nothing to do with bone structure. What mattered were small moments: one partner pointing out a bird outside the window, telling a joke, asking a question. Gottman called these “bids” for attention. In his research on newlyweds, couples who were still married years later had turned toward each other’s bids about 86% of the time. Couples who later divorced had done so only about a third of the time. The ones headed for trouble tended to ignore those moments, or meet them with contempt. That’s the part no app can score. Can you listen? Are you curious about other people? Do you keep your word, laugh at yourself, show up when someone needs you? Those traits are learnable, they compound over time, and they don’t require a hammer. What it looks like in real life Character isn’t abstract. It shows up in a hundred small ways, and people notice every one of them, often on the very first date. It’s how you treat the server. Few things sink a date faster than someone who is charming across the table and curt to the person bringing the food. Kindness to people who can’t do anything for you is one of the clearest signals there is, and almost everyone is watching for it. It’s how you handle a bad moment. The flight gets canceled, the restaurant loses the reservation, it starts pouring rain halfway through the walk. One person sulks, snaps or blames. Another cracks a joke, finds a plan B and makes the disaster part of the story. You learn more about someone in 10 minutes of things going wrong than in a month of things going right. It’s whether you listen. Most people can tell within minutes whether someone is actually curious about them or just waiting for their turn to talk. The person who remembers the name of your sister, asks a follow-up question and wants to hear the end of your story is rare, and rare is attractive. It’s whether you can laugh at yourself. A man who can tell a story about his own embarrassing moment, or a woman who can shrug off a spilled drink with a grin, comes across as secure. Insecurity, on the other hand, shows up as defensiveness, bragging and needing to win every exchange. It’s how you talk about other people. Listen to how someone describes their exes, their coworkers, their family. Someone who has a cruel word for everyone will eventually have one for you. Someone who can say “it didn’t work out, but they were a good person” is showing you how they’ll treat you on your worst day. It’s whether you do what you say. Texting when you said you would. Showing up on time. Remembering the thing you promised to help with. Reliability doesn’t make for viral content, but it’s the foundation of trust, and trust is what turns attraction into a relationship. It’s having a life of your own. People are drawn to someone who is excited about something, whether it’s cooking, a band, a business idea, a pickup basketball game or a garden. Passion is magnetic because it’s proof of an inner life. A person whose whole personality is their appearance has nothing left to talk about once the novelty wears off. And it’s how you make people feel. Years later, few people remember exactly what someone’s jawline looked like on the first date. They remember whether they felt safe, seen, respected and like themselves around that person. That feeling is the real attraction, and no surgeon can install it. A better kind of maxxing None of this means young men should stop caring how they look. Sleeping well, exercising, eating real food, getting a good haircut and dressing like you mean it are all worth doing. They make you feel better, and feeling better makes you better company. Doctors call that the healthy end of the spectrum, and it’s fine. The problem is the promise that your face is your fate. It isn’t. If young men put a fraction of the energy they spend on jawline forums into friendships, hobbies, honesty and learning how to make another person feel seen, they would find that the thing they’re chasing gets a lot closer. Call it charactermaxxing. It won’t get you a 9 out of 10 from an AI. It might get you someone who loves you.