Face Value: Why ‘Looksmaxxing’ Is More Than Mewing and Mirrors

Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Images: Eric Robert—Sygma/Getty Images, Lion's Gate/Getty Images)by Fay Bound-Alberti is a professor of history at King's College London and the author of "The Face: A Cultural History." May 2, 2026 11:00 AM CUTYoung men in bathrooms and bedrooms fix themselves on a scale via social media communities. Then, they agonize over their appearance and devise “soft” and “hard” ways to improve it. Welcome to the era of “looksmaxxing, " which has taken over the manosphere and is creating a new aesthetic vocabulary in the process. Underpinning it is a purportedly “objective” scale of attractiveness, based on such traits as “facial harmony,” balance, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism, to rank people on a scale from zero to eight, with eight being the highest (aka, in looksmaxing parlance, a “Giga Chad”) and zero the lowest (or what the phenomenon terms “subhuman.”) It doesn’t stop there; there are subcategories. Soft looksmaxxing involves skincare and grooming, fitness, and diet. There are specific techniques, such as “mewing”—pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth—that are supposed to enhance your jawline, as well as eyelid pulling in pursuit of “hunter eyes." Some even embrace “starvemaxxing” (not eating) to make the face thinner.