Looksmaxxing: Male Gaze Optimization, not Self Improvement

By Amber Lin

I spent an hour diving into looksmax.org, lookism.net, and r/looksmaxingadvice, and what I found was a rabbit hole of terminology and extreme advice. Terms like "PSL gods," "htn," and "true adam" dominated the forums, while posts with titles like "Sexmaxing: SWALLOW THE SEXPILL: How to become a SEX GOD and get girls addicted to you,” "How to Reconstitute and Inject Peptides,"  and “How to Non-Surgically Shave Jaw Bones” racked up hundreds of comments and upvotes.

The looksmaxing community promises a world of "better appeal" full of pretty privilege and an easier life. The reality? A world full of never ending judgement and insecurities. This article details the origins and implications of the looksmaxing community, and how physically and mentally harmful it can be by applying male centered standards onto women.

Looksmaxing as an ideal originated in the early 2010s within alt-right communities on 4chan and incel groups. The Guardian writes that although looksmaxing has existed for decades, methods have gained popularity through social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

What was once confined to obscure forums has exploded into mainstream media, with millions of young people encountering these ideas. Influencers now package looksmaxing advice as legitimate wellness content, stripping away the explicitly misogynistic language while maintaining the same toxic core: that your worth is determined by how others perceive your physical appearance, quantified through pseudo-scientific ratings and measurements.

What makes looksmaxing particularly insidious for women is that it takes a framework designed by men, for men, and forces it onto female bodies. The rating systems, PSL (puahate-sluthate-lookism) scales, facial thirds analysis, canthal tilt measurements, were created by men obsessing over what they believed women found attractive. When these same metrics are applied to women, they ignore centuries of how women have actually been taught to present themselves, instead reducing female beauty to male fantasy.

Women are told to achieve "hunter eyes" and sharp jawlines, features that originated from male communities rating each other. Women are being molded into what men in these communities have decided is attractive. The irony is brutal: women are adopting beauty standards created by the very communities known for their hatred of women, communities where "looksmaxxing" was originally framed as necessary because women were supposedly too shallow to see past appearance.

The human cost of this obsession is devastating and measurable in dissolved fat, surgical scars, and drained bank accounts. Young women are getting buccal fat removal to achieve hollow cheeks deemed "high PSL," despite the procedure often aging faces prematurely. They're purchasing peptides online to inject at home, risking infections and complications to achieve results promised by anonymous forum users. Jaw fillers, chin implants, canthoplasty, rib removal—procedures once considered extreme are now discussed casually as "softmaxxing" versus "hardmaxxing" options. A 19-year-old gets her lips dissolved and refilled three times in a year, chasing a ratio she saw calculated in a Reddit post. Another spends thousands on a rhinoplasty to correct a "nasal bridge inadequacy" she never noticed until a looksmaxing analysis video appeared on her feed. Every year, younger and younger clients enter the offices of plastic surgeons, chasing a fantasy that is unachievable.

So what's the solution? First, we need to recognize that looksmaxing isn't self-improvement but rather, self-degradation. Reject the premise that your value can be quantified by strangers online. Stop supporting creators that promote numerical ratings onto beauty and support invasive procedures. For women specifically, understanding the misogynistic origins of these communities is crucial, because when you know that looksmaxing standards were created by men who view women with contempt, it becomes easier to reject their authority over your appearance. The goal of looksmaxing was never to promote self-care for women, but to reclaim autonomy over our bodies and faces, making choices based on what genuinely makes us feel good rather than what satisfies an arbitrary standard created by anonymous men on the internet. 

Your face has never needed “fixing,” it’s the system that taught us that, that does.