Looksmaxxing: What's Harmless, What's Pseudoscience, and What's Genuinely Dangerous

Educational journalism, not medical advice. Every claim here is checked against its cited sources by editor Tim Bunce — a health writer, not a physician. It isn’t specific to your situation: for health decisions, talk to your own clinician. How we work →

What “looksmaxxing” actually is

Looksmaxxing means “maximising” your looks. The vocabulary — “mewing,” “mogging,” the “PSL” rating scale — began on incel (“involuntary celibate”) message boards in the 2010s and went mainstream on TikTok in the early 2020s, carried largely by young male creators Solea 2025 The Conversation 2024. The community sorts its advice into two buckets. Softmaxxing is the reversible, non-invasive stuff: skincare, haircare, grooming, posture, fitness, sleep. Hardmaxxing is the invasive end: cosmetic and jaw surgery, anabolic steroids and growth hormone, extreme dieting, and fringe practices like “bone smashing.”

It is overwhelmingly a young-male phenomenon, and peer-reviewed analysis describes it as a gateway: a 2025 study in the journal Crime, Media, Culture documents how incel ideology is deliberately rebranded through looksmaxxing and the pseudoscientific “PSL” attractiveness scale — cloaking misogyny and a racialised hierarchy in the friendlier language of “self-improvement” so it can spread on mainstream platforms Solea 2025. Researchers and clinicians note the audience is often appearance-insecure adolescents nudged toward this content by recommendation algorithms The Conversation 2024. (You will see “billions of views” figures quoted; those come from unstable hashtag counters, so treat the scale as “very large” rather than a precise number.)

The basics that actually work — and are free

Here is the part the trend gets right, and it’s worth saying plainly because it’s the safe, cheap, evidence-based core. None of it “transforms” you, but it genuinely helps:

• Daily sunscreen is the single best-supported appearance habit. In a 4.5-year randomised trial, adults who used sunscreen daily showed about 24% less visible skin ageing than those who used it occasionally Hughes 2013. The American Academy of Dermatology recommends daily broad-spectrum SPF 30+, gentle cleansing, a moisturiser, and — importantly — not smoking, which “greatly speeds up how quickly skin ages” AAD.
• Sleep shows on your face. In a controlled experiment, observers rated the same people as less healthy and less attractive after sleep deprivation than after a normal night Axelsson 2010.
• Exercise helps body composition and mood. The WHO recommends 150–300 minutes of moderate activity a week plus muscle-strengthening on two or more days, with benefits for body composition, sleep, and reduced anxiety and depression WHO 2020.

The honest framing: these habits protect your long-term skin and health and shift things at the margin. They do not reshape bone, and they are not what the dramatic “before-and-after” videos are actually selling.

“Mewing” and “bone smashing”: the pseudoscience

The trend’s two signature techniques do not work the way it claims. Mewing — pressing the tongue flat against the roof of the mouth, named after British orthodontist John Mew and his son Mike — is promoted as a way to sculpt a sharper jawline. The American Association of Orthodontists issued a public warning in 2024: “There’s no scientific evidence to support its claims of reshaping the jawline, and the potential risks outweigh any unproven benefits” AAO 2024. The only indexed maxillofacial commentary on mewing found no research supporting it as an alternative to orthodontics Lee 2019. The technique’s leading promoter, Mike Mew, was erased from the UK dental register by the General Dental Council in November 2024 for using scientifically unsupported treatments liable to harm children GDC 2024.

“Bone smashing” — deliberately striking your own face, sometimes with a hard object, hoping the bone “heals back stronger” and more defined — is worse than useless. Adult bone does remodel, but only under gradual, controlled physiological loading, not blunt trauma StatPearls. Uncontrolled impact to the face produces contusions, micro-fractures, dental and nerve injury, and real fractures — the opposite of the goal — which is why maxillofacial surgeons have flagged it as a dangerous trend Grillo 2024. (For the same reason, “mewing” should not be confused with legitimate, clinician-supervised myofunctional therapy in children, which is a separate topic.)

The dangerous end

Beyond the pseudoscience sits a genuinely hazardous fringe. We mention these only to warn — there are no instructions here:

• Cosmetic leg-lengthening. This means surgically breaking healthy leg bones to add a few centimetres of height. It is major surgery with months of immobility; a systematic review found that while serious complications were comparatively uncommon, routine “problems and obstacles” (infections, contractures, nerve issues) were common, and risk rises with greater lengthening Marwan 2020. A specialist-centre series of patients seeking revision found high rates of non-union and hardware failure — and most had been operated on abroad, at under-regulated “height-surgery” clinics Al Ramlawi 2024.
• Anabolic steroids and “SARMs.” The FDA classifies SARMs (sold to build muscle) as unapproved drugs — not dietary supplements — and links them to liver injury requiring hospitalisation, and increased risk of heart attack and stroke FDA. Anabolic-steroid abuse is tied to cardiomyopathy, adverse cholesterol changes, blood clots, sudden cardiac death, and infertility, sometimes in young, otherwise-healthy users Borowiec 2025. “Selective” is a marketing word, not a safety guarantee.
• “Starvemaxxing.” Extreme caloric restriction does not sculpt features — it triggers eating disorders that damage the heart, bones, and brain, and anorexia carries one of the highest mortality rates in psychiatry NEDA.

The common thread: unregulated, self-administered products and self-surgery, often sourced online or overseas, with no way to know what you are actually getting.

The real risk is mental health

This is why we treat looksmaxxing as a health story, not a beauty one. Ordinary grooming is fine. But appearance focus becomes a clinical concern when it is consuming — often hours a day — driven by a perceived flaw others can’t see, and causing real distress. That is body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), an obsessive-compulsive-spectrum condition affecting roughly 2% of people, with strikingly high rates of suicidal thinking in clinical samples Phillips 2021 IOCDF. Its male-skewed form, muscle dysmorphia (“bigorexia”) — never feeling lean or muscular enough — is a recognised diagnosis linked to steroid use, depression, and elevated suicide risk, and it disproportionately affects adolescent boys and young men Nagata 2026.

The medium feeds the disorder. A 2025 meta-analysis of 83 studies (more than 55,000 participants) found that appearance-based comparison on social media is moderately associated with worse body image and disordered-eating symptoms Bonfanti 2025. (That is an association, not proof of cause — but it is a consistent one.) And the same communities that teach looksmaxxing often carry the “blackpill” fatalism and misogyny of incel culture, which peer-reviewed work documents being rebranded as self-improvement to reach younger audiences Solea 2025. The warning sign isn’t that a teen wants clearer skin — it’s preoccupation, ritual checking, restriction, hopelessness, and woman-blaming language.

If you’re worried about a teen — what helps

If this describes someone in your life, the most protective response is calm and ongoing, not a single confrontation. Paediatric and mental-health bodies converge on a few moves: stay curious rather than lecturing, ask what they’re seeing online, and build media literacy about how filtered and edited images are made — the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests openers like “how do you think those photos and videos are created?” AAP. Steer toward the boring, safe basics and toward what bodies do rather than how they look.

Treat these as reasons to call your doctor, not to panic: intense distress, hours lost to mirror-checking or grooming, food restriction, social withdrawal, or any talk of hopelessness or self-harm NEDA. The reassuring part is that the conditions this can shade into are treatable: national guidance recommends cognitive behavioural therapy (including exposure-and-response prevention, with family involved for young people) as first-line for BDD, with medication a clinician-monitored option NICE, and a 2024 meta-analysis of 15 randomised trials found psychological treatment produces large, durable reductions in BDD symptoms Liu 2024.

Where to turn: the BDD Foundation (information and support for body dysmorphia); the National Eating Disorders Association and UK charity Beat (eating disorders); and for immediate crisis support in the US, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) or the Crisis Text Line (text HOME to 741741).

The bottom line

Looksmaxxing isn’t all nonsense, and that’s exactly what makes it sticky: it wraps a few genuinely useful, free habits (sunscreen, sleep, exercise) around a core of pseudoscience (mewing, bone smashing), a dangerous fringe (surgery, steroids, starvation), and — underneath it all — an ideology that can corrode a young person’s mental health. If someone you love is deep in it, you don’t need to police their skincare. Keep the basics, drop the rest, watch for distress, and remember that the conditions this trend can trigger are real, common, and treatable.

This article is educational journalism, not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for care from a qualified clinician. If you or someone you know is struggling with body image, disordered eating, or thoughts of self-harm, please contact a doctor or one of the crisis resources listed above.

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