Sculpted waist, clear skin, and having a tone body are beauty standards that apply to both men and women. Beauty standards can also be defined as, “A set of values applied to the appearance of both men and women to be regarded as beautiful and handsome in order to rightly fit in the community”. Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but our ideals on beauty and what we find attractive can be influenced based on others opinions and what we see people deem as “attractive”.
When you feel attractive, you feel confident, and feeling confident is great. It makes you feel secure and brings out your authentic personality.
For most, to feel confident they start by investing in their looks which makes up a lot of people’s self confidence. Although some forget looks aren’t all that it is to feel confident. There’s your experiences, passions, aspirations, and personality traits. All these are qualities that make you, you. People tend to forget this by focusing solely on looks.
The lengths “lookmaxxers” go to to become attractive is scary and people are being influenced to follow.
A lot of people view the young males who use terms like “looksmaxxing”and its various other forms unironically as insecure and unable to see that looks aren’t all that women care about. They indulge in things like listening to “alpha male” podcasts to gain confidence and buy gimmick products like a plastic ball to chew on to obtain a sharper jawline. It may seem to just be encouraging self-care and gaining confidence, but in reality it’s encouraging toxic ideology by promoting harmful tactics.
Looksmaxxing is the new trending term Gen Z created originating from TikTok more associated with being self-absorbed and having low self-esteem. The term refers to enhancing your looks to its highest potential at all costs with the hopes of looking more attractive to other people. Not yourself. This can cause serious self-image issues. As they become more and more obsessed with looks and the opinions of others their self-esteem and confidence slowly disintegrates.
There are trends to determine how attractive you are, or showing off your attractive features. There are even apps you can use through the Apple Store or Google Play that will provide a rating using AI.
These trends can be very toxic considering the youngest you can be is just 13 years-old to register and have an account on looksmaxxing.com. Seeing these trends that come up with new insecurities can be very damaging to teens who are still developing and are sensitive to perception. Some trends that went viral are the “positive or negative” canthal tilt,various forms of people showing off their “perfect ski-slope nose”, mewing, and mogging.
The filter would display a line across your eyes and would determine a positive or negative canthal tilt. A positive tilt basically means your eyes are more slanted compared to droopy. Another filter trend was of a giant hooked nose that would cover your own, then would come off to reveal a small button nose. This trend caused some controversy because many deemed it offensive insinuating that ethnic noses were ugly compared to more small button noses.
The last two trends were more seen as a joke rather than something serious people practice. Mewing refers to having your jaw closed with your tongue relaxed on the roof of your mouth. This is supposed to make the appearance of your double chin less prominent. Mogging is when an attractive person stands next to an “below average” person. In the context of the average person they “got mogged”.
The article, “Looksmaxxing” is the disturbing TikTok trend turning young men into incels explains some of what these tactics are. They are, steroid use, hair transplants, plastic surgery, using pumps for penis stretching, removing ribs for a sculpted waist, ‘bone-smashing’, which involves using hammers to break bones in the face to look more masculine, ‘starve-maxxing’, which encourages extreme dieting and eating disorders, and ‘white-maxxing’, which involves using creams to present as more white. All of these are extremely dangerous.
Although height usually isn’t something you can do to improve, there are now limb lengthening surgeries that can add up to 3 inches to your height. The demographic of people who get this surgery are mostly men. It can be assumed that people who get this surgery get it for cosmetic reasons. This is an extremely risky procedure and the possibilities of what can go wrong – nerve damage, muscle damage, joint contracture, dislocations, and arthritis – are not worth it.
The appearance based trends that come from TikTok can turn toxic very quickly as shown. The app creates new insecurities which puts people down affecting the mental health and social lives of people. One way to combat these toxic trends is to not participate in them. Especially in the ones that put others down in order to uplift another.
Beauty standards are the same as trends meaning they come and go. “Looksmaxxing” is a trend that needs to go before it damages a generation of young men both physically and mentally.
