For James, it started with muscles. He was about 16 and had become self-conscious about his physique, fearing that he wasn’t buff enough to attract girls. He found his way to a bodybuilding forum and began to work out. He can’t remember when it happened, but at some point trolls began to infiltrate the forum. They were visitors from another online community with a different focus.

“Their general vibe was quite mean,” says James, who prefers not to use his real name. “They’d take images people had posted of their impressive physiques and be like: ‘You guys forgot to work out your faces!’”

Despite the meanness, curiosity pushed James over to the forums, which were largely focused on facial aesthetics. He discovered a new world in which mainly young men and teenage boys scoured pictures of each other for perceived flaws and purported fixes.

The forums hummed with brutal judgment and offered James a compelling new outlet for his insecurities. “I was learning about problems I hadn’t even noticed,” he says. “I had a short face and a short chin, my nose was too wide, my eyes were too far apart, my hairline was too high … You don’t see a lot of these things until someone else points them out and then you can’t stop seeing them.”

James had become hooked on looksmaxxing, an online community of people seeking to enhance their faces. He began to learn a strange code that members used to compare their characteristics: IPDs (interpupillary distance, the gap between the eyes); canthal tilt (the angles of the eyes); mewing (a tongue exercise that supposedly improves the shape of the jaw). “The ultimate goal is to improve your SMV,” says James. Sexual market value, that is.

Looksmaxxing has existed for at least a decade, but has exploded in recent months from obscure forums and Reddit pages into mainstream social media – and TikTok in particular. Impossibly chiselled jaws, pouty lips and cheekbones as high as the Egyptian pyramids are prized, along with “hunter” eyes (those angled slightly downwards towards the nose – a positive canthal tilt).

Looksmaxxing influencers have gained huge followings, while algorithms promote videos watched by millions. Models such as Jordan Barrett and Francisco Lachowski have become pin-ups. The trend has prompted bewilderment among parents and teachers and concern that young people are finding yet more reasons to feel bad about themselves.

It’s not clear how far mainstream looksmaxxing has moved away from its roots in online “incel” (involuntarily celibate) communities. In these spaces, men blame women and feminism for their romantic failings; they retreat into a world in which they pursue their own masculine ideals, ideally acquiring ripped bodies and – in the case of the looksmaxxers – strong jaws and hunter eyes.

“The vast majority of the groups that we work with are now aware of looksmaxxing,” says Mike Nicholson, a former teacher who runs a workshop programme in schools called Progressive Masculinity. He is talking to me the day after a report by researchers at University College London and the University of Kent found that TikTok algorithms amplify misogynistic content, helping to normalise it in playgrounds. (In response, TikTok said it removed misogynistic content, which it prohibits, and questioned the report’s methodology.)

“We come at this from a very sympathetic point of view,” Nicholson adds. “But the world that these young men and boys are inhabiting is one that is trying to increase their anxieties and potentially lead them down this path that, if you’re not careful, can lead to ‘incel’ ideologies.”

James, who is in his 20s and works in finance in the UK, started on the forums in about 2015, when they were still niche. He began “softmaxxing” – tweaks such as hair styling, skincare remedies, diets and exercise regimes. But as the sites threw up an ever harsher mirror, he began seeking more extreme fixes, known as “hardmaxxing”.

He went under the knife in 2022 to smooth his nose. Last year, he had Botox in his forehead, threaded his eyebrows and got his teeth whitened and straightened. He is considering chin surgery, which he says would add thousands to the £10,000 he estimates he has spent on his face. “The size of the chin is quite a dimorphic trait, like a signal of masculinity,” he says. “I’m looking to vertically extend mine by a few millimetres.”

James says he stays out of the more toxic corners of the looksmaxxing forums. If anything, he thinks the new wave on TikTok has excluded much of the misogyny, but he says the potential remains for such content to stoke insecurity: “Some of these flaws aren’t fixable at all … for a lot of teenagers out there, it can definitely be bad for their mental health.”

***

One of the biggest names in TikTok looksmaxxing is Kareem Shami, a 22-year-old student in San Diego, California. He goes by the username syrianpsycho and has more than 1.5 million followers. His profile picture is Patrick Bateman, the fictional serial killer played by Christian Bale in the film adaptation of American Psycho.

Shami grew up in Syria until his family was uprooted by war in 2012 and resettled in Beirut. He says he was picked on at school. “I was the only Syrian and was quite white-looking, despite being Arab,” he says. “I was deemed an outcast and it triggered something in me.” Acne also dented his confidence. Shami, who moved to the US to go to university, began trying to improve his look. He hit the gym, treated his spots and restyled his hair and clothes, documenting some of what he was doing on TikTok, where he offered advice.

Shami says he wasn’t even aware of looksmaxxing until 2022, when he posted a fast-cut progress video showing how his appearance had altered between the ages of 17 and 20. It’s striking how poised and polished he has become, although he accepts that boys’ faces can change radically in those years. Either way, the video blew up; it has been viewed 15m times.

It also went viral in the looksmaxxing forums, fuelling a scepticism bordering on contempt among original members of the community for brash TikTok arrivistes. “I get daily hate,” says Shami, who says he rejects looksmaxxing’s “incel” tradition and that Bateman, an “incel” pin-up, inspired him only to improve his looks. “Of course no one actually wants to be like that character.” He says he relates to Bateman’s loneliness.

Shami says older adults don’t get looksmaxxing. There has been much hand-wringing in the media over “bone smashing”, for example, an extreme technique that involves taking a hammer to your face to promote more “manly” regrowth when the bones repair, but little evidence that anyone is actually doing it. “The majority of the posts that you see about looksmaxxing are not serious,” he says, adding that he promotes only softmaxxing.

But James’s journey shows that vulnerable kids can take this stuff seriously. The biggest buzzword is mewing, which Shami espouses. A teenager looking a bit tense in the jaw area may well be holding their tongue firmly against the roof of their mouth in an attempt to strengthen their jaw muscles.

In a bizarre clash of cultures, mewing is named after an orthodontist from Kent who is well into his 90s. Since the late 1970s, John Mew (and later his son, Mike Mew) has promoted orthotropics, his controversial alternative to braces and tooth extractions. The Mews say that their tongue exercises, childhood palate‑expanding devices and dietary changes can improve the aesthetics of the face, as well as overall health.

Rejected by the orthodontics profession, the Mews began to market their techniques on YouTube, gaining the attention of the burgeoning looksmaxxing community and turning them into unlikely rebel heroes. They are the subjects of Open Wide, a Netflix documentary released in the US last month. (It has not been scheduled for release in the UK.)

Promoted by looksmaxxers as a face hack, mewing has gone mainstream, with more than 1bn mentions on TikTok. “Sometimes I stop young people and ask them if they know about mewing and it’s now 100%,” says Mike Mew from his clinic in Croydon. Now that looksmaxxing has gone mainstream, he is scrambling to regain control of his name and take a cut of a potentially lucrative pie. In November, he launched a training app for his “facial development techniques”.

But other orthodontists are concerned about the craze. “We worry that people are using a technique that is unproven, unmonitored, unsupervised and based on misleading claims,” says Matthew Clover, the director of clinical practice at the British Orthodontic Society. In January, the American Association of Orthodontists said that “scientific evidence supporting mewing’s jawline-sculpting claims is as thin as dental floss”.

Mike Mew claims he is the victim of a wider vendetta: “I’m considered the antichrist in orthodontics.” He is in the middle of a misconduct hearing at the General Dental Council into his treatment of an unnamed child. The council argues there was “no adequate objective evidence” for his treatment, which included the use of a palate expander and head and neck gear.

Mew says he has not misled patients. “You’ve got to be able to put out ideas and say: ‘This is what I believe and this is the premise upon which I’m treating you,’” he says.

The Mews see their work as a crusade to restore our jaws in particular, which they argue have weakened and regressed in the industrial age, causing a range of problems from crooked teeth to breathing trouble. But does Mike Mew worry that by piling into a trend that is more obsessed with looks than health, he risks spreading insecurity? When I ask him this in an email, he doesn’t reply.

James says he never got on with mewing. He is not alone in seeking harder fixes. Cosmetic face surgeons have reported fielding more inquiries from young men. “We’re definitely noticing this,” says Mehmet Manisali, a maxillofacial surgeon based in Harley Street, central London, whose name I find in a looksmaxxing post on Reddit.

At least once a fortnight, Manisali performs chin surgery of the sort James is considering. He shows me gruesome pictures of the procedure, which involves exposing the chin bone inside the mouth, under the bottom front teeth, sawing off the end of it and repositioning it with a titanium plate. Bone grows back to fill the gap, which can push the chin down or forward by several millimetres.

Manisali charges about £10,000 for the procedure and says he vets patients over several meetings, often gently turning them down. “I have to decide if it’s somebody for whom a minor change might be a major confidence booster, versus somebody who’s got unrealistic expectations and it’s going to be the first step towards a disaster,” he says.

James says he doesn’t regret getting sucked into looksmaxxing. He thinks gaining knowledge and being enthusiastic about improving his appearance has improved his confidence. “But I’m also not deluded,” he says. “The other side of the sites is tied into women and relationships and is generally pessimistic. And I think that mentality has maybe hindered me, because it’s easy to think that women will always be chasing something better, richer … and maybe they’re never going to be 100% satisfied with me.”

He spends less time on the forums or TikTok these days, but he still finds it hard not to obsess over his looks. He thinks he will get the chin surgery, perhaps later this year. “I’ve been thinking about it so long that I just want to kind of do it now,” he says. “And then that will be the last big thing. Then I’ll just be able to move on from all of this. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.”

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