The Quiet Science of Looksmaxxing

"Looksmaxxing" is the practice of setting out, methodically and with some determination, to make oneself more attractive. The word joins "looks" to the suffix "-maxxing," meaning to pursue a thing to its very limit, and it divides broadly into two camps. There is softmaxxing, which covers the harmless and sensible, skincare, grooming, exercise, decent sleep, and hardmaxxing, which reaches for cosmetic surgery and the like. It grew up in the men's self-improvement corners of the internet through the 2010s, a habitat with its own private dialect, before emerging blinking into the daylight of TikTok around 2023.

In its milder form the pursuit is unremarkable, the sort of preening any creature does before it hopes to be noticed. The younger enthusiasts, though, built an entire vocabulary for it, ranking one another by jawline and speaking of "mogging," the act of visibly outshining a rival simply by standing nearby. A fringe drifted towards genuinely unwise measures, including a practice of striking the facial bones in the belief it sharpens them, which the medical profession regards with alarm. Presiding over the whole endeavour, half in earnest, is Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, whose exacting morning routine the young have taken up as a kind of scripture.

What sits beneath the jargon is a very old thing, the wish to be looked at and found pleasing, now fitted out with metrics and a strict routine. There is something almost admirable in the diligence, and something faintly sad in it too, the suspicion that no jaw is ever quite sharp enough for the person attached to it. One is inclined to let them get on with it, and to note, from the far side of the hedge, that a great deal of effort goes into a face, when a twitch of the nose has always seemed to do perfectly well.