From the canthal tilt filter to mewing and mogging, looksmaxxing has gone viral on social platforms as young people adopt increasingly black-pilled ways to enhance their physical gains
“When bro tries to intimidate you but he has a negative canthal and prey eyes.” This year, your TikTok feed has likely been populated with videos of teens working on their facial gains: mogging, mewing, and hunter v prey eyes. Looksmaxxing videos with thumbnails featuring the chiselled avatar of supermodel Jordan Barrett, AKA the pinnacle of online masculinity, are garnering millions of hits across every social platform, determining one’s attractiveness through pseudo-scientific (and viral) methods such as the canthal tilt filter and bone-smashing – literally hammering your face in the pursuit of a stronger jawline. These ‘glow-up tips for men’ are big business for the younger gen, with video clips and how-to guides promising to transform even the lowest value virgin beta into an AMOG (alpha male of the group) – you just need to follow these five simple steps! “I just wanna be your sigma,” goes TikTok’s viral “Fanum Tax” song, its internet-coded lyrics are obviously parody, but it doesn’t take much to clock the subliminals.
From the cesspits of 4chan and manosphere messaging boards, lookism – the idea that the hotter you are, the better others treat you – has gone mainstream, as young men online have begun to adopt increasingly black-pilled ways to enhance their physical appearance. Heading the movement are figures like 18-year-old influencer Dillon Latham and 22-year-old Syrianpsycho who share looksmaxxing tips to their millions of followers, documenting their transformations through guides on ‘how to glow-up’ and mogging updates in the gym. As one popular YouTube video puts it: “It’s like making a character in a video game and trying to use as many points as you can in upping the looks-bar stat.”
The term “looksmaxxing” has roots in incel culture and the belief that a majority of people will choose a sexual partner based purely on appearance. Still, it’s through viral trends that we’ve seen incel rhetoric bubble up into everyday internet-speak. “Do I have hunter or prey eyes?” has garnered millions of views on TikTok, and determines a man’s attractiveness based on his eye shape – the idea is that a man with ‘little to no upper eyelid exposure’ is dominant and mysterious, whereas a rounder shape suggests you’re weak and submissive. Another is the canthal tilt, an AR filter that puts a red line over your face, echoing the incel belief that the angle of a person’s eyes reveals their standing in the socio-sexual hierarchy. As for those locked into the glow-up TikTok algorithm, they will likely have encountered a For You Page filled with Gigachad jawlines and forensic analyses of the ‘ideal’ facial structure, from the angle of a person’s nose to their face-hair ratio.
Clearly, none of these methods actually determine how attractive you are. Look at the feed and you’ll find clips of conventionally good-looking teens ironically sharing videos with captions like, “negative canthal tilt it’s so over for me”. But trends don’t appear out of nowhere, and for all the videos making fun of these ideas, there are equal amounts posting sincere updates on their mewing progress. These get progressively darker and more extreme – memes featuring descriptions of ‘A10 hunter eyes’ make direct reference to a pseudo-scientific eye caste system that went viral on 4chan. “Eyebags detected (time to ropemaxx)” says another TikTok, which is shorthand for suicide, while the hashtag ‘starvemaxxing’ (starving yourself) has four million views on the platform.
@alim_kh0 Glow up tips for men !! #glowup #men #huntereyes #fyp #viral ♬ ICEWHORE! - Lumi Athena
As with anything online, it’s hard to tell what’s ironic and what’s sincere. Edgemaxxing, skinmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, racemaxxing – incel-speak is everywhere on the feed, though this obviously doesn’t make you an incel, or necessarily mean that you actually believe the beauty standards the videos preach, though as some videos suggest, there’s a fine line between making fun of a trend and partaking in it. Maybe you, too, found yourself mindlessly scrolling through 100-day mewing updates before acting all mysterious and mogging the other guys in the room. Or perhaps your desire to achieve hunter eyes has got you eyelid pulling and squintmaxxing down the camera lens. The rise of incel culture across socials is essentially gym bro-ism for the TikTok generation, aimed at young men growing up online playing video games and sipping on Prime Energy, who are familiar with alt-right figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson purely because the algorithm won’t stop pushing it on the FYP. Remember incels are an Extremely Online community as interwoven into the early internet fabric as 4chan. This makes them fluent in the ways of the internet, especially how social interactions specific to gender play out across social platforms.
In our hypermediated digital landscape, we’re seeing this memetic shorthand – once exclusive to the niche corners of the internet – absorb into the mainstream. This is as much a symptom of the internet’s growing influence on pop culture – think online neologisms like ‘pilled’ and ‘core’ – as it is the mainstream adopting these pre-established paradigms, the sort of internet-poisoned (and pseudoscientific) reasoning that’s literally pushing phrenology to the masses through pretty boy v slayer facial charts and face filters that show you the optimal mid-face ratio needed to achieve harmonious features.
“The rise of incel culture across socials is essentially gym bro-ism for the TikTok generation, aimed at young men growing up online playing video games and sipping on Prime Energy”
But this isn’t exclusive to male-dominated socials, incel theory has been creeping into GirlTok, where hashtags like ‘How Can I Be Prettier?’ are garnering millions of views as a growing community of young women post videos asking users for glow-up advice on how to be That Girl. Or sorting themselves into irresistibly cute categories of prey animal: “Are you cat pretty, bunny pretty, fox pretty or deer pretty?” (in contrast to the man-equivalent ‘Are you an eagle, dog, bear or reptile?’ earlier this year). It reminds me of an earlier trend siren versus doe eyes, which placed an emphasis on seducing men by either ‘sirenmaxxing’, entrapping men’s souls like a predator traps its prey, or fawning passivity by appearing soft and innocent in what writer Alex Quicho refers to as going ‘prey mode’.
On the surface, this is all harmless fun – who doesn’t want to be a deer-pretty-cutecel listening to Mitski and sharing clear-pilled clips of The Virgin Suicides? There’s obviously an infinitude of coquette-coded memes that don’t fall into gross incel territory even if girlblogging has always, to some degree, placed an emphasis on achieving ring-light perfection. Things get progressively worse when you begin to encounter videos such as angel v witch skull, however, a viral trend that sorts the structure of your face into ugly or pretty, and has roots in Nazi eugenics. On dedicated femcel forums like r/vindicta, users pedal incel-adjacent methodology to wield objective beauty with tips on ‘how to go from a 4 to 8’ and ‘how to gain pretty privilege’, from softmaxxing (make-up, skincare, style) to hardmaxxing (surgery, medication), plus an expansive lexicon of ‘-maxxing’ terminology. Want to appear more carefree and fun? Try blonde-maxxing. Want to better harness your feminine energy? Try personality-maxxing. Looking to achieve a model-like body? Try health-maxxing.
@teddymoutinho #duet with @Jubarte #pretty like hello? #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #looksmaxxing ♬ original sound - Jubarte
If this all sounds deeply unsettling, you’re not alone. The lasting effects of fringe ideas forged by the internet’s lost bois entering mainstream discourse are low-key terrifying, though it mirrors a more general shift as far-right rabbit holes infiltrate the everyday. The pendulum is always swinging, yes – the inclusion and representation of the 2010s body positivity movement has given way to Y2K era fixation on being skinny, just look at celebrities like Kim and Khloe Kardashian trading out their BBLs and the rise of weight loss drugs like Ozempic. But the internet also plays a role in shaping our beliefs beyond traditional politics – where the Overton Window hasn’t just shifted, but collapsed entirely. “I do tend to think that there is a second dimension in politics emerging. We have the first dimension which is left-right, well-established, but the main thing happening on social media is the possibility of a second dimension, which is pro-anti-establishment,” suggests Kevin Munger, an expert in internet technology and political communication.
To be clear, if liberals are the establishment, it means they’re in favour of keeping things the way they are – so anything that goes against this narrative appears ‘cool’. Similar to how the raw meat diet began as a trend within reactionary online communities like the Right Wing Bodybuilder (RWBB) before hitting the masses with celebrities like Matt Healy sinking his teeth into a raw steak on stage or Heidi Montag snacking on raw bison heart in the streets of LA. Yes, the last decade’s dismantling of outdated beauty standards was huge – “but this institutional push towards aesthetic equality has also been accompanied by a historically unprecedented era of economic inequality,” suggests artist and internet researcher Joshua Citarella. “The incels’ hyperfixation on human difference is a reflection of our external material circumstances and an attempt to make sense of an increasingly unequal world.”
“The incels’ hyperfixation on human difference is a reflection of our external material circumstances and an attempt to make sense of an increasingly unequal world” – Joshua Citarella
Niche corners of the internet have always held up a dark mirror to society. For young people, the lesson is this: beauty is the ultimate social capital. Whether you agree or not, incel theory lends itself to a certain pragmatism – things that dictate your social outcome such as dating apps and social media are built on an Attention Economy that rewards those who the machine sees as desirable. Think the 600 likes v 15 likes meme and Hello, Human Resources?! Presumably, it’s the same realisation that had English-language translator Ariana Reines deeply unwell when she wrote in Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl that: “Every Young-Girl is an automatic, standard converter of existence into market value.” Only the value is now accelerated by the algorithm, which enforces beauty standards as metrics through likes, swipes and Bold Glamour filters that standardise your face so that it better resembles an AI doll.
So, it’s not all about jawlines. At times deeply flawed and problematic, the rise of incel culture is a symptom of late capitalism, and the subsequent unrealistic beauty standards imposed on us. To translate this to incel-speak: mogging your friends might mean you have rizz, but it also makes you high value, which means financial and physical gains. But it’s also a red flag: tracking your 100-day mewing progress might help you to achieve sharper features but the condition of late-capitalism are such that no amount of squintmaxxing can solve it. Raging against the machine shouldn’t mean playing by its rules.
Want to find out more? Listen to Logged On episode six “Prey Mode: why predator vs prey discourse is everywhere online” with special guest Alex Quicho here. You can also find it on Audible, Apple Podcasts and Spotify