Looksmaxxing and Bone Smashing
DESCRIPTION:
Looksmaxxing is a TikTok niche – the Tagesschau is a major outlet. Why the outrage obscures more than it explains. Halpin, Baudrillard, Bourdieu.
Looksmaxxing as a discourse: From a niche TikTok topic to a media sensation
Looksmaxxing is currently considered the masculinity trend. Tagesschau, BARMER, AOK, Spektrum and countless magazines are reporting on it. The scientific community, however, remains largely silent. This post shifts the analytical focus from the phenomenon itself to the discourse surrounding it.
What it’s about:
· Why a TikTok subculture is taking centre stage in the media,
· talking about Looksmaxxing in an attention economy, and
· Why ‘Bone Smashing’ in particular became the perfect headline.
What is Looksmaxxing, and why are we talking about it?
Looksmaxxing refers to the systematic optimisation of one’s appearance in line with ideals shared within online communities. Characteristic features include a hierarchical mindset expressed in tier lists, an anatomical measurement logic (canthal tilt, hunter eyes, jawline, FWHR) and the assumption that social and sexual success is a direct function of measurable aesthetic parameters. The terminology originates from incel forums of the late 2010s, particularly from platforms such as Lookism.net and r/IncelTears. It was there that the classifications Chad, Stacy, Normie, and Incel emerged, along with the notion that one’s appearance is genetically determined and can only be altered through radical interventions. The mainstream TikTok variant has evolved since 2022 and now distinguishes between softmaxxing (skincare, strength training, mewing) and hardmaxxing (surgical procedures, peptide protocols, bone smashing).
The trend is undeniable, though its scale is difficult to gauge. Reliable epidemiological data are lacking. What is available consists of ethnographic and sociological studies, foremost among them the study by Halpin et al. (2024) on looksmaxxing and male body culture in *Sociology of Health & Illness*.
Research is largely silent, whilst the daily press talks incessantly. It is precisely this asymmetry that makes the discourse in need of explanation.
Anyone who wants to understand this trend cannot ignore this discrepancy seriously. The analytically interesting question concerns the relationship between reality and its portrayal in the media.
How widespread is the ‘Looksmaxxing’ phenomenon really?
The data is scarce. Halpin et al. conduct a qualitative analysis of TikTok content, describe the ideological links to the Manosphere, and explore the logic of self-reification. No representative surveys on prevalence exist as yet. Hashtag volumes on TikTok run into the high millions, but say little about the number of active practitioners. Watching a video primarily means: watching a video. Nothing else.
Shifts can be observed in aesthetic and medical practices. More young men are approaching dermatologists and plastic surgeons with specific anatomical aspirations. This, too, does not constitute a mass phenomenon. In everyday psychotherapy, ‘Looksmaxxing’ has so far rarely featured as an explicitly named topic. Related issues such as body dysmorphia, bigorexia or depressive moods following social media consumption, on the other hand, have been familiar for years.
The gap is striking. One open-access study, a few international qualitative investigations, and otherwise a media frenzy. Anyone taking media coverage as an indicator of social relevance would have to regard looksmaxxing as a mass movement. At best, however, it is a subculture.
The few available indicators confirm this assessment. Google Trends shows a level of visibility in German-speaking countries that lags significantly behind established search terms in the field of mental health (burnout, depression, anxiety disorder). Although aesthetic medicine practices report an increase in enquiries from younger male patients, the scale remains modest and is concentrated in urban centres. What we are observing is a media subculture with high journalistic appeal.
Why is the scientific community remaining silent on the reports in the daily press?
This scientific reticence has methodological reasons. Clinical research relies on case definitions, samples and validation procedures. Diagnostically, body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) has existed in the DSM-5 for decades. ‘Looksmaxxing’ would, at best, be a sociocultural variation on an already well-defined clinical picture. Against this backdrop, it is difficult to justify a separate line of clinical research.
The social sciences are somewhat more active, as their subject matter is, in any case, discourse. The study by Halpin et al. is oriented towards media studies and cultural sociology. It analyses content, narratives and ideologemes. This is the appropriate perspective on a phenomenon that unfolds primarily as online discourse.
The daily press operates according to different selection criteria. News values such as negativity, surprise, personalisation, visual appeal and potential for follow-up coverage mean that a manageable subculture can develop into a story that receives extensive media coverage. Looksmaxxing serves several of these values simultaneously. This explains its appeal to editorial teams.
What role do health insurance providers play in the looksmaxxing discourse?
BARMER, AOK, TK and similar players engage in content marketing. The search behaviour of their policyholders guides their editorial approach. Whatever is Googled gets an article. Looksmaxxing has crossed a visibility threshold beyond which the health insurers’ communication logic automatically kicks in.
This is not manipulation; it is platform logic. Health insurance companies want to appear as competent points of contact on health-related topics. As soon as a term circulates in the public sphere, the internal editorial team produces a thoroughly researched article. The article confirms the relevance of the topic; this confirmation fuels further search queries, and the volume grows.
A second effect, barely noticed in everyday life: health insurers’ publications are, in turn, cited as sources in journalistic research. They lend the topic institutional weight. What begins as content-- marketing ends as a cited authority. Thus, a manageable online practice becomes a socially recognised subject of diagnosis.
What makes ‘Bone Smashing’ the perfect headline?
Bone Smashing refers to the practice of hitting oneself in the face with hard objects to trigger bone remodelling through microfractures and to force a more pronounced facial structure. The practice draws on Wolff’s Law, which describes the adaptation of bone structure to stress. Wolff himself, however, had in mind the response to chronic physiological stress (such as increased bone density through strength training), not to acute traumatic stress. Applying this principle to deliberate striking of the face is medically nonsensical and potentially disfiguring. What actually results are bruises, microfractures with irregular healing, nerve damage and, in some documented cases, permanent asymmetries.
From a journalistic perspective, bone smashing is the ideal detail. It combines self-harm, youthful masculinity, online subculture and a pseudo-scientific attempt at rationalisation within a single practice. The detail is visually striking, provokes unequivocal moral outrage and is easy to recount. A single absurdity within the Looksmaxxing content universe is enough to sell the entire phenomenon to the media.
In fact, bone smashing is itself controversial within the Looksmaxxing community. In relevant forums, people warn against the practice or ridicule it. The media portrayal suggests a different picture: bone smashing appears as the core, whilst the subculture’s established logic of evaluation and mewing routines recede into the background. This shift is the condition for media appeal.
Who is dying from “Looksmaxxing” — and what is being reported?
By 2026, the death toll within this subculture is no longer an abstract concept. Bostin Loyd, one of the most prominent US bodybuilders with a history of years of publicly using anabolic steroids and peptides, collapsed and died while training at a gym on the morning of 25 February 2022. The post-mortem revealed end-stage kidney failure, triggered by the peptide adabotid. In April 2026, the twenty-year-old influencer Clavicular (Braden Peters) collapsed live on Kick, presumably after taking a mixture of Adderall, dextromethorphan, pregabalin, ketamine and an industrial solvent, known in the community as the ‘Pentastack’. Years of anabolic steroid use had rendered him infertile by the age of twenty. Connor Murphy, one of the biggest fitness influencers of the 2010s with four million YouTube subscribers, has completely ruined his career through steroid-induced psychotic episodes, ayahuasca use and, ultimately, self-promotion as a drinker of his own semen.
These cases are not isolated incidents. The use of steroids and peptides is spreading to ever younger age groups. Eric English is a documented case: publicly fitness-focused at thirteen, by fifteen already muscled to a degree that is biologically hardly possible without substances. Sixteen-year-old Martin Memphis is already showing severe acne as a result of testosterone use. In the YouTube discourse of late May 2026, the question is openly circulating: Why are so many looksmaxxing influencers dying?
Noteworthy is the shift in media attention. Bone Smashing, the most visually marketable practice, is widely scandalised in the daily press. By contrast, the practices that are actually the most deadly—steroid cycles and substance abuse—remain in the shadows of the reporting. Media coverage demands symbols. The hammer to the jaw provokes outrage; the slow failure of the kidneys remains clinical.
Who is funding the movement—and why?
Investigations by several journalists have revealed that Peter Thiel is financing the rise of looksmaxxing influencers via middlemen and Twitch donations. Clavicular has spoken openly on his own stream about a major donor named “P”, who not only made direct donations but also paid for thousands of subscriptions for other viewers, a form of algorithmic reach subsidy. Thiel is simultaneously involved in Enhanced Games (a sporting event where performance-enhancing substances are permitted, with an estimated market volume for enhancement substances of $335 billion by 2035), in Prospera (a deregulated special economic zone off the coast of Honduras where Mini Circle offers experimental gene therapies), and in politicians who pursue a deregulatory agenda.
At first glance, the connection seems absurd: one of the world’s most powerful tech billionaires is funding a twenty-year-old who hits himself in the face with hammers. But it makes sense once you are familiar with Thiel’s intellectual references. In several interviews, he has cited the German constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt, a legal theorist of the Third Reich, as a formative influence. He explicitly draws parallels between the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and the USA of the 2020s. In this context, Looksmaxxing influencers are not a sporting phenomenon, but a political infrastructure for normalising a class society founded on eugenics and operationalised through technology. In Looksmaxxing forums, the term ‘subhuman’ – the English translation of ‘Untermensch’ – is used to describe people who, according to the scene’s aesthetic criteria, fall below a certain threshold of value. This is no coincidence.
How do trends produce themselves through the media?
The discursive feedback loop follows a reproducible pattern. An online subculture coins a term. An editorial piece explains it to the general public. Search queries rise. Health insurance providers, magazines and advice centres publish explanations. Social media picks up on the coverage, often with ironic or indignant comments. Algorithms amplify the content. It is thus through the coverage itself that young men first encounter the trend it describes.
This self-referentiality is clearly observable in the Looksmaxxing discourse. Reports quote TikTok influencers, who in turn discuss the reports. Health insurance companies link to daily press articles, which in turn quote their statements. The study by Halpin et al. serves as a scientific anchor for all articles, though it is rarely read in detail.
What emerges is the collective production of a trend through public awareness. The term ‘Looksmaxxing’ existed before its media career. Looksmaxxing, as a major cultural topic, arises from its media resonance.
What is taking place here was described by Baudrillard in “Simulacres et Simulation” (1981): the map preceding the territory. The discourse generates its own subject. The TikTok content on Hunter Eyes circulates as filtered footage of actors and models whose images have already been aesthetically selected. What is presented as a ‘naturally attractive’ bone structure has no originality. It is a third-order simulacrum, an image without a referent. Anyone who subsequently wanted to break their own jaw was adapting their body to an image that itself had no basis in reality.
Moreover, the discourse’s self-referential nature obscures the funding structure underpinning it. What appears to be a TikTok subculture is, in fact, the groundwork for a political agenda.
What function does the looksmaxxing discourse fulfil in the gender debate?
Looksmaxxing allows for a rare rhetorical constellation. One can write about male body image, aesthetic self-optimisation and the psychological strain on young men without coming under suspicion of rehashing old gender clichés or reviving topics devalued by feminism. The phenomenon is new enough, youthful enough and subculturally dazzling enough to be regarded as progressive and accessible.
Added to this is an ideological dual function. Looksmaxxing can be read as a symptom of toxic masculinity (young men adopting the destructive logic of patriarchal evaluation systems) as well as evidence that men, too, suffer from the pressure to conform to beauty standards, which has long been regarded as a specifically female burden. The two interpretations do not contradict one another. Both find their place in the reporting. This makes the topic editorially flexible.
A society that has commercialised its evaluation systems (market-value semantics in partner-seeking, physical optimisation as a career advantage, self-marketing as a core competence) discovers in Looksmaxxing an extreme consequence of its own logic and reacts with moral outrage. Outrage spares us the need for analysis.
What does the Looksmaxxing discourse say about society?
Anyone who reads the looksmaxxing discourse closely learns more about the commenting public than about the young men in the subculture. The outrage over bone- -smashing and jaw implants obscures the fact that the underlying evaluation logics are accepted far beyond the subculture. Botox in the boardroom, hair transplants among politicians, filtered LinkedIn profiles and aesthetic requirements for job applicants are established practices.
Looksmaxxing radicalises a cultural norm, making it visible. The young participants speak openly about what the working majority politely keeps quiet. They talk about ‘animal lists’ where mainstream society speaks of ‘personal branding’. They measure the canthal tilt where boardrooms train ‘executive presence’. The practices differ. The logic behind them is similar.
What crystallises in the practice of Looksmaxxing was systematically described by Baudrillard in *La Société de Consommation* (1970): the body as “the most beautiful object of consumption”, as a system of signs within a market of mutual recognition. What the subculture makes explicit is the logic of codification itself. Animal lists, measurement tables and optimisation protocols are the clumsy translations of a cultural operation whose polite form has long been the consensus. The scandal of Looksmaxxing lies in its legibility.
This familiarity makes the discourse uncomfortable. It is easier to scandalise a TikTok trend than to take a critical look at the everyday practice of self-marketing. The Looksmaxxing discourse is therefore also a form of defence.
Added to this is a generational shift. The collective outrage shifts the underlying market logic onto a wayward youth. Older generations, when reading the Looksmaxxing coverage, can be led to believe they are witnessing a derailment, without noticing the structural continuity with their own lived experience. Anyone who has spent three decades climbing the career ladder with a suit, a hairstyle and self-presentation training may consider a sixteen-year-old’s ‘mewing’ to be absurd. It is precisely this act of distancing that constitutes the affective function of the discourse.
Why is scientific caution justified?
Science worthy of the name works with samples, operationalisations and replication. Looksmaxxing eludes these methods because its definitional boundaries are blurred. Who counts as a Looksmaxxer? The TikTok user? The Mewing practitioner? The younger generation of filler patients? Every definition produces different figures.
Added to this is the problem of trends. Research funding, PhD topics and publication opportunities are increasingly geared towards public attention. A research community that chases every media trend produces short-lived studies on transient constructs and, in five years, will be dealing with self-measurement apps that nobody uses anymore. The caution of clinical research protects against precisely such trends.
This does not preclude clinical attention. Where looksmaxxing becomes a primary preoccupation leading to body shame, compulsive control behaviours, social isolation and self-harm, treatment falls within established diagnostic frameworks (BDD, bigorexia, obsessive-compulsive spectrum, depressive disorders, dissociative experiences). A new diagnostic term is not required for this.
Symbolic capital: Looksmaxxing as a display of conversion
In "La Distinction" (1979), Bourdieu analysed the body as a vehicle of social distinction. Posture, accent, gestures, complexion, teeth and physique are inscribed in class histories. What appears to be a natural trait is the sedimentation of a life course, which Bourdieu calls habitus. Physical capital, later elaborated by Wacquant as a distinct form of capital (Body & Soul 2004), belongs to the forms of symbolic capital: recognised, legitimised value within a field of recognition.
Looksmaxxing puts this insight into practice in its rawest form. Anyone striving for ‘Hunter Eyes’ or ‘Hollow Cheeks’ is engaging in an open conversion: economic capital (Botox, fillers, surgery) and disciplinary work (mewing, strength training, dietary regimens) are transformed into physical capital, which in turn is intended to be translated into symbolic capital. Recognition, sexual desirability, and social visibility are the hoped-for returns. The subculture puts Bourdieu into practice without having read him. It understands the body as capital and says so openly.
What it overlooks is the condition of possibility for symbolic capital: méconnaissance, the failure to recognise its social genesis. Symbolic capital functions as long as its origin in accumulation and position remains invisible, as long as it appears to be a natural endowment. A face created through surgery is recognisable as a manufactured face and loses its symbolic value the moment it becomes legible as an investment. Looksmaxxing, therefore, produces a paradoxical commodity: bodily capital that devalues itself by identifying itself as capital. The discourse on Looksmaxxing is therefore also the public articulation of this recognisability. Speaking about the practice renders the practice legible and deprives it of the condition for its success.
Summary
· Looksmaxxing is a TikTok subculture with roots in incel forums, characterised by anatomical measurement logic and hierarchical thinking in animal rankings.
· Media coverage stands in sharp contrast to the scant scientific data available; an open-access study (Halpin et al. 2024) provides the bulk of the cited material.
· Health insurance publications follow the logic of search volume and produce content on all terms that exceed a certain visibility threshold.
· Bone Smashing is a form of edgy content that is often derided within the subculture, yet is portrayed in the media as its very essence, making the whole subject marketable.
· Trends are generated by their own media coverage; self-referential loops replace empirical findings.
· Looksmaxxing lends itself to discourse because it allows discussion of male body image without political risk.
· The outrage over the subculture obscures the extent to which the underlying market logic has infiltrated the established adult world.
· Scientific caution is methodologically justified; vigilance remains necessary where established clinical conditions exist (BDD, bigorexia, obsessive-compulsive spectrum).
· Looksmaxxing, as a cultural fact, exists primarily in the discourse surrounding it; the phenomenon itself remains a niche one.
· Theoretically, in Baudrillard’s sense, the map precedes the territory; discourse produces the practice it purports to describe, and the body functions as a sign within the code of recognition.
· Read through Bourdieu, looksmaxxing constitutes an open conversion of economic capital into physical and symbolic capital; the visibility of the operation deprives the acquired distinction of its symbolic effect (méconnaissance).
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