A 15-year-old boy is celebrating his progress online, posting two remarkably similar X-ray images of his legs, taken eight months apart. He claims a drug called Aromasin has kept his growth plates – the areas of cartilage at the end of his bones, which close as puberty stops – open. This, he believes, will allow him to grow taller, despite already being 6ft.
Aromasin, which reduces oestrogen levels, is used to treat women with breast cancer. It is unlicensed for teenagers; there is no evidence it will help him.
In fact one GP I talk to, Dr Deepali Misra-Sharp, suggests it is putting the boy at risk of ‘weak, brittle bones, long-term osteoporosis, delayed sexual maturation, infertility or other hormonal dysfunctions’. Plus, she adds: ‘Unsupervised use of medication can worsen mental health issues.’
Which, in this case, it appears to have done.
‘My mind is very f****d,’ admits the teenager, who says he blagged the drugs from a pharmacy despite already being tall because ‘my height is all I have, and I don’t know if I’ll be tall enough to make up for the rest’.
Heartbreaking claims, but he is far from the only boy agonising over his height, weight, skin or bone structure on the forum. Welcome to the increasingly popular trend of ‘looksmaxxing’, where looking good is all that matters – whatever the risks.
If you’ve wondered why your own teen has started asking for expensive skincare, increasing his protein intake, buying gadgets such as Gua Sha tools for ‘sculpting the face’, or pontificating over the right cologne, looksmaxxing is probably the reason.
For the uninitiated, the term means making yourself as attractive as possible and comes from an online world that tells teenage boys it is impossible to succeed in life – or love – without good looks.
Kareem Shami decided to overhaul his appearance after being bullied about his acne. He is pictured right after his transformation
Although girls, of course, have long been pressurised by beauty ideals, this trend is specific to adolescent boys and young men. The aesthetic they seek is largely homogenous – the classic chiselled jaw, high cheekbones, almond-shaped ‘hunter eyes’, rippling muscles and, crucially, height.
Their pin-ups are men such as Brazilian male supermodel Francisco Lachowski and Jordan Barrett, an Australian catwalk star who Vogue has dubbed the ‘Model It Boy of the new Era’, and their language is peppered with insider slang and acronyms for prescription drugs and grooming rituals to improve their ‘SMV’ (Sexual Market Value).
Looksmaxxing involves a spectrum of ‘self-improvement’ measures.
There’s ‘softmaxxing’, which urges boys to undertake expensive 12-step skincare regimes. ‘Starvemaxxing’, which is about cutting food consumption, losing fat and thereby accentuating musculature or facial bone structure. ‘Mewing’ is a technique said to reshape the jawline by repositioning the tongue against the roof of the mouth (but which remains entirely unproven), and at the extreme end you find forums discussing full-on surgery, especially to maximise the chin or alter your jaw structure.
Astonishingly, even dangerous DIY methods such as ‘bone-smashing’ – breaking bones in the belief this will improve facial structure – are advocated online.
Most frightening of all are the looksmaxxing forums where boys post selfies only to be told by other users they will never be able to ‘ascend’ – make themselves attractive to women – and should consider their lives over.
The term looksmaxxing was coined on obscure websites in 2014 and started with incel culture – a group of ‘involuntarily celibate’ men who blame women for denying them relationships. They see it as a solution, says Mike Nicholson, a former English teacher now at the forefront of the fightback against boys’ newfound obsession with their looks.
Since 2022, he has run a workshop in schools and youth clubs called Progressive Masculinity, which aims to give boys confidence and warn them about the pitfalls of patriarchal gender roles.
23-year-old Shami promotes softmaxxing – highlights, haircare, soy bean serum – to his 1.8million followers and charges £15 a month on his website to help men ‘ascend’
He has noticed a preoccupation with looks coming up repeatedly, with boys as young as 12 discussing their worries.
Now, thanks to TikTok where looksmaxxing has more than two billion views and influencers get rich telling impressionable young followers how to improve every aspect of their appearance, the trend has reached the mainstream. Recent research from skincare company Dove found 59 per cent of boys aged between ten and 17 felt pressure to be physically attractive.
Many UK parents have no idea their sons are being lured into the looksmaxxing world. An obsession with the gym or £30 moisturiser might be just the start.
A new Channel 4 documentary, The Toxic World Of Perfect Looks: UNTOLD, uncovers the dark side of looksmaxxing, most poignantly when presenter Ben Zand speaks to a young man who spent £65,000 on leg-lengthening surgery. He describes it as feeling like ‘someone trying to rip your skin apart’.
At the forefront of the TikTok looksmaxxing trend is 23-year-old Kareem Shami, known by the username @syrianpsycho – a reference to Patrick Bateman from the 2000 film American Psycho, ‘often hailed as the apex of incel beauty standards,’ says Nicholson.
Shami promotes softmaxxing – highlights, haircare, soy bean serum – to his 1.8million followers, and charges £15 a month for access to ‘step-by-step actionable video lessons’ on his website to help men ‘ascend’. ‘While some of his messages on hygiene, self-care and exercise can be considered healthy advice, there is a danger of being pulled into some of the darker subcultures associated with looksmaxxing,’ Nicholson adds.
Shami speaks to me over Zoom from his Los Angeles home. With his flawless skin showcasing facial symmetry and gleaming teeth inches from his screen, he is charming but emphatic.
‘If you don’t care for how you look, which is very unlikely because then you’re not even human, I envy you. We’re built in a society where people care about these shallow things,’ he says.
Shami insists the encouragement of male grooming is a ‘net positive’ because ‘we’ve had many years where men were quiet about their insecurities. A lot of men don’t keep up with their hygiene. Girls don’t struggle with this because they’ve been taught at such an early age. Looksmaxxing opens the door.’
Yet he acknowledges the dark side. Indeed, Shami, whose family fled war in Syria for Lebanon when he was 12, fell victim to it himself. A scrawny teen with acne, eye bags and bad hair, he was bullied to such an extent he lacked the confidence even to go out.
‘I had kids call me ‘pizza face’, girls pointing and laughing because I had flare-ups, people saying I had a horrible haircut like a mushroom.’
After being called a ‘zombie’ aged 17, he radically overhauled his appearance by sleeping properly and going to the gym, getting ‘appropriate sun’, whitening his teeth, visiting a dermatologist and growing his hair. Three years later – by which time he’d left home to study for a pre-law degree in California – he was barely recognisable in confidence or looks.
When he posted his ‘glow-up’ – a progressive sequence of before and after pictures – two years ago, it went viral (the clip now has 36 million views on TikTok), inciting envy from obsessives on looksmaxxing forums. ‘I was getting death threats. It was scary,’ Shami tells me. ‘This community is full of people that have nothing to lose and they’re dangerous.’
Shami admits that some influencers promote surgery they haven’t had for attention and post ‘idiotic’ advice. ‘Some is satirical, and some isn’t. They’re posting it to get views.’
But how is an impressionable teenage boy to know the difference? One British TikToker I come across with what seems a serious account tells his 146,000 followers to ‘stop falling for scams’ before suggesting they wash their hair with egg yolk.
Others, Shami says, are ‘doing what I would have done if I had no morals’ and starting businesses to sell methods such as ‘rubbing your eyes in a certain direction to make your eyes look better’.
‘The kids are curious, they watch their videos and then they pay to join their academy to learn how to do it, and it’s bulls**t. There are people making ten times the money I do because they don’t care for their viewers.’
I put it to him, however, that he has espoused the benefits of oil pulling – swilling coconut oil around your mouth to improve oral hygiene – and mewing, neither of which are scientifically proven. He looks slightly flummoxed.
On looksmaxxing forums, damaging disinformation and despair abounds. One member deliberates injecting filler into his heels as a ‘pretty easy way to gain a couple of centimetres’
‘Oil pulling was a bit of a trend. I don’t advocate too much of that. Mewing I did advocate for a while. A lot of people think of it as an exercise that’s going to change their appearance, but that’s not how it works. It’s just posture.’
The problem is, says Harley Street non-surgical aesthetics doctor Ed Robinson, ‘it’s become commercialised. You can buy mewing devices and jaw-trainers. That’s when you’re taking advantage of people.’
His clinic’s patients are now 20 per cent male, and over the past two years he’s seen an increase in men claiming that looking more ‘masculine can get you further in life’. Dating prospects are ‘something people bring up quite a lot’.
A looksmaxxing profile, he says, requires ‘a wide-set chin, jawline, and more defined cheekbones, which is achievable with filler’. At 32, he has had filler to change the shape of his own ‘recessed’ chin and has been having Botox for five years.
Yet the motivation for this kind of work is key, he says. ‘I work 36 hours a week for the NHS as an anaesthetist and that makes me feel tired. It’s nice to have procedures that mean I don’t look on the outside how I feel on the inside. I turn people away if they show signs of body dysmorphia – if they’re pointing out a flaw I can’t see, or if I feel what they want is unnatural.’
The lure of looksmaxxing starts long before surgery is an option.
‘Most 12-year-olds in our workshops say it is really important to have a cool haircut, to smell nice. They want to go to the gym,’ says Nicholson. When he asks boys if they would take steroids to look bigger, it’s not unusual for half of the group to put their hands up.
Some influencer posts seem presented in a way that will encourage self-loathing of the body. Take US TikToker Dillon Latham, 19, (followers: 1.7 million), who repeatedly says unshaved armpits make you smell ‘disgusting’.
On looksmaxxing forums, damaging disinformation and despair abounds. One member deliberates injecting filler into his heels as a ‘pretty easy way to gain a couple of centimetres’, while a baby-faced boy posts a picture of himself begging for advice on how to look better. ‘I’ll do anything but surgery,’ he writes – not because of his age or safety concerns, but because ‘I don’t have the money right now’. (He’s told by other members to lose weight and get fillers for his cleft chin.)
Despite – or, indeed, because of – ever more obsessive grooming rituals, older boys are showing unhealthy attitudes towards girls, says Nicholson, to the extent they won’t converse with them lest they are humiliated. ‘There’s a huge climate of fear.’
The desire to attract women is the driving force behind looksmaxxing influencer Austin Wayne’s 102,000 YouTube subscribers.
‘If you look at studies, women only choose guys on dating apps that look better than everyone else. I think it comes down to a place where they just want to get more girls,’ says Wayne, who acknowledges some of his subscribers ‘don’t feel they’re good enough’ because ‘they’re comparing themselves to models’.
As a successful model himself – a strapping 6ft 6in, he has posed for Polo Ralph Lauren – he is perhaps a case in point. ‘Height does make a difference, whether or not we want to believe it,’ he tells me.
He claims most boys aren’t growing as tall as they could because ‘they’re not sleeping enough’. ‘They’re eating all this junk food. That’s going to make you a bit shorter. My thing is optimising your health as much as possible so you can grow taller naturally.’
To that end, he has made videos entitled ‘the best stretches to grow taller’ and ‘seven ways to grow taller at any age’ which include taking Vitamin D supplements, strength training and getting plenty of sleep. He has his own supplement company and charges followers upwards of £400 for tailor-made exercise, meal planning and looksmaxxing courses run by male models.
‘I pretty much oversee their entire life,’ he says, adamant that confidence and charisma are as important as appearance.
‘I believe you should look more attractive and invest in your appearance. But it’s not everything. Obviously, [looksmaxxing] has such a powerful, cult-like following, it can be hard to change their mind.’
Harley Street doctor Ed Robinson says his clinic’s patients are now 20 per cent male, and he’s seen an increase in men claiming that looking more ‘masculine can get you further in life’
Arresting angular jaw and aquamarine eyes aside (we speak on Zoom – he, too, is in California), he says he was an under-confident teen: ‘I was scared to talk to girls.’
Now in his mid-20s, by 17 he was manipulating his chin with his hands to try to change the shape of his jaw. ‘Nothing crazy. I’ve never used a hammer,’ says Wayne.
Around the same time, he went on a health and exercise frenzy, crediting the 8in he grew in a year in part to drinking a gallon of raw, unpasteurised cow’s milk (which can carry harmful bacteria) every day. As he built muscle, his confidence soared. ‘If you can change your appearance, it’s going to leak into other aspects of your life,’ says Wayne, who urges his followers to ‘do the basics – getting a good haircut…good facial hair for your face, working on the jaw line, working on your skincare’.
Wayne eats ten eggs and a pound of beef a day to fuel his four times a week, one to two-hour-long gym sessions, which help keep his body fat at eight to ten per cent. ‘Body fat is a huge aspect of showing how good you can look,’ says Wayne, who says the ideal is ‘ten to 13 per cent…above 15 per cent actually isn’t very healthy for men’.
When I check on Nuffield Health’s website, it says a body fat level of 19 per cent is normal in men.
Although there is clearly a difference between social media stars promoting self-improvement and the dark underbelly of incel-fuelled obsession, I can see how easy it would be for impressionable young men to spiral from one to the other.
Back on the looksmaxxing forum (seemingly unsupervised by older, calmer heads), members are responding to the 15-year-old trying to alter his height with Aromasin. ‘Nice results, man,’ writes one; ‘good s**t bro’, says another.
No matter the cost – and for this poor lad, it could be high – the pursuit of physical perfection is prized above all others.
- The Toxic World Of Perfect Looks: Untold is available to stream on Channel 4 now.
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