Stephen Imeh wanted to make history. He’d never really dreamt of being an influencer, but in April he noticed an opportunity to break through.
There were virtually no looksmaxxers—people who spend enormous amounts of effort to glow up—who looked like him, and he wanted to change that. So he made a plan. Imeh posted a workout video on TikTok, with plans for more, and updated his bio to “FIRST BLACK LOOKSMAXXER.”
But as soon as the 20-year-old Houston-based college student posted the video, he was bombarded by racist comments. “I don’t think even an hour went by and I was getting comments like, you’re a monkey, you’re an n-word hard r,” he says. Another comment suggested Imeh “just be white,” or “jbw” as it’s known in incel circles. None of it made sense to him. “I was like, wait, what?”
It wasn’t Imeh’s first encounter with looksmaxxing, the online movement most prominent among young men that emerged from incel culture and took off on TikTok in 2023, which promotes maximizing your physical attractiveness. In 2022, Imeh was a junior at a predominantly white high school in Texas that only had “three other Black kids,” and he wasn’t fitting in. He decided to search for self-improvement tips online. “I googled ‘How to look better’ and the number one thing was looksmaxxing,” he says. Suggestions included a tongue exercise called mewing, working out, healthier eating habits, even plastic surgery. Imeh only lasted two weeks before he called it quits. “It was kinda cringe.” But because it happened the year before looksmaxxing blew up on TikTok, he says, “I didn’t tell anyone about it.”
In the three years since that experience, looksmaxxing has become more popular than ever, and Imeh, currently studying to be a speech therapist, wanted to give it another shot. Maybe he could be the face of a Black looksmaxxers trend, he reasoned. But he felt the ecosystem had become even more toxic in his absence. “The community before, it wasn’t as bad. But it spawned a new wave of people.”
The ordeal in April was a wake-up call. Today, Imeh posts anti-looksmaxxing content to his 36,000 followers. “I’m obviously not included in this community, so why would I keep trying to contribute?” His videos poke fun at the movement’s flaws and silly status markers, like being able to “mog” someone, which means you are the better looking person in a side-by-side comparison. (This is his fifth TikTok account after being reported by members of SkinnyTok for also calling out pro-eating disorder content.) “It’s so easy to rage-bait” looksmaxxers, he says. “I might post, ‘This is what I do to get my skin clear,’ then someone will comment ‘Oh, you can never get your skin clear because you’re a Black slur, slur, slur,” he says over FaceTime, repeating the word half a dozen times.
Looksmaxxing, which originated in online forums like 4chan a decade ago, suggests that a man’s success in life is directly tied to how good he looks. The purpose of the movement is to increase your overall “sexual market value,” and the more Eurocentric features you have, the higher you are on the “physical sexual looks” scale. On message boards, looksmaxxers use codes to rate other men on their journey. Young men refer to the process as “ascending,” where they work to attain a chiseled jawline, glass-smooth skin, and “hunter eyes” (almond-like contour, deep-set position, low set eyebrows). Those who have earned “Chad” status are considered among the most desirable of the pack. Many of the movement’s aims align with the wave of manosphere ideology that is reanimating American society under the Trump administration, where hypermasculinity has become both a performance and a weapon of oppression.
For a trend obsessed with the pursuit of beauty, looksmaxxing is also defined by how ugly it treats maxxers who are not white. Accusations of racism have followed some of its most popular influencers, like Clavicular, who, in multiple TikToks, has recited audio using the n-word and implied Black people have inferior looks. (Clavicular did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Hate speech is also a common occurrence on popular looksmaxxing forums. In December, in a post titled “The reason why have Black genes is a nerf,” members debated why “Blacks also have worse skulls than jews.” (In gaming, “nerf” implies an attempt to weaken an opponent.) Another post suggested that “thugmaxxing”—adopting a stereotypical rapper aesthetic of someone from “the hood” with sagging pants and neck tattoos—was the only kind of “-maxxing” Black people could succeed in. Some have likened the trend to a resurgence of eugenic beauty standards, though as one TikTok user pointed out, “Racism isn’t going to make you look better.”
Extreme Sport
Plastic surgeon Gary Linkov can often tell when a patient has been red-pilled by the movement. The client is typically an obsessive gym bro who asks to “improve their mid-face” or for a chin implant to help with facial symmetry. And for the most part he’s happy to fulfill their requests, though he does question the racial archetype on which looksmaxxing is based. “A lot of these movements start with more of a Caucasian influence, and then more minority groups feel like they have to conform in some ways,” says Linkov, who works at Facial City Plastics in Manhattan. “But they have different features and they have their own beauty that should be enhanced and not transformed into a whole different race.”
Nonsurgical cosmetic treatments are on the rise among young men. The most popular include hair restoration, laser hair removal, and body contouring procedures like CoolSculpting, which targets fat reduction and helps tone muscles. Botox injections have also become increasingly normalized among Gen Z youth who want their chin to have a more chiseled look, relying on dermal fillers and collagen skin boosters to treat signs of aging. (These treatments are sometimes called Brotox.) According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, men are undergoing cosmetic procedures at a higher rate compared to years prior to 2020.
Khai Taylor is a 21-year-old Black YouTuber who has found something of a new life thanks to the looksmaxxing movement. Not long ago, he was manning the front desk of the gym where he works when a young woman made note of his eyes. “She was like, ‘I never noticed you have really pretty eyes.’ And I was just thinking, this would have never happened to me four years ago.”
Back then, he suffered from severe acne, was an introvert, and had never been on a date. “You have to understand, I had no option in the first place,” he tells me from his Dallas area home over Zoom.
Taylor got serious about looksmaxxing in 2021 and started posting his own content in 2023 because he didn’t want young Black men to suffer through the same yearslong process of making the wrong mistakes. His YouTube channel is littered with tips on self-improvement and, as with most looksmaxxing creators, his content is marketed like a series of infomercials. Tutorials include “How to ACTUALLY Lose Face Fat,” “I Transformed My Ugly Subscriber Into A CHAD – And Here’s How,” and my personal favorite, “How to Get an Anime Villain Body.”
In November 2023, Taylor posted “I Tried ‘Looksmaxxing’ For an Entire Year”; it became his most-watched video to date, with 842,000 views. His inbox was flooded with requests from young men eager to enhance their facial aesthetics. “This was the best presentation of a looksmaxx I’ve ever seen, without making me feel like shit lol *,” one comment reads. At his peak, Taylor says he was coaching 10 to 15 guys a week over the phone.
It wasn’t until he started posting YouTube content that he was faced with hate speech. “It’s bad,” Taylor says, but notes that outside of the forums the racism is “not as outspoken and verbal as you think. It’s internalized. The way they judge faces is what’s the most racist to me because they base it off of white features. They’re never going to use a stereotypically Black face as what’s the ideal.”
Imeh also faced an intense wave of backlash for his posts. Earlier this year he was doxed and started receiving messages “every five minutes” from people suggesting he kill himself. “They love their community down,” he says.
Taylor admits some of the solutions posed by looksmaxxing are extreme. Medical professionals worry that many young men are becoming too reliant on pseudoscience—techniques like “bonesmashing,” an unproven method to remodel facial bones by breaking them—that can lead to serious complications. “That is where the movement deviates from healthy self-improvement into a territory of self-harm,” says Elaine Kung, a board-certified dermatologist at Future Bright Dermatology.
Many young men find refuge in the looksmaxxing community, Taylor says, because it explains to them why they can’t attract women and equips them with the tools to do so. Given his success, I was curious how he navigates the negative associations that come with being a looksmaxxer. “I get where they’re coming from because I sort of went through it,” he tells me, adding that the movement gets a bad rap because of how people view incel culture. “If you grew up until you were 22 or 23 without experiencing the touch or intimacy of a woman, being socially isolated, and people made fun of you, you would start to understand why these men are so obsessed with their facial angles and being in this space.”
And the problem is only getting worse, Imeh says. “I really do think they are so bigoted because the top looksmaxxers share their political views.” There is now a “whole world of racist rhetoric, and these young boys are eating it up,” he says, labeling the movement a “right-wing pipeline.”
“The rise of conservatism in America is feeding into their media. It’s, ‘I need to have blue eyes, long hair, and bleached skin.’ It’s sad. There will always be an audience waiting to consume it.”
U Got the Look
Taylor wants to counteract that sort of programming. His dream is to become a famous YouTuber. He wants to use his platform to motivate young men in all areas of their life, and he says that looksmaxxing just happened to be where he found his first audience. Most Black looksmaxxers—Austin Dunham, FitxFearless—don’t call themselves that. They’re lifestyle influencers who also offer advice about dating, finances, and having a “grindset” (grind mindset). It’s the kind of brand Taylor wants to build.
Social media has made people hyperaware of their onscreen appearance at the same time that gendered stigmas around cosmetic procedures are disappearing. But that shift has also had harmful repercussions. “The curated, filtered reality of social media often sets an impossible standard,” says Kung, who believes the growing interest in male aesthetics is “a positive step toward self-care” but that certain aspects of looksmaxxing also champion “a very specific and often unattainable male ideal, which can fuel a dangerous obsession with one’s appearance,” exacerbating issues such as body dysmorphia.
Taylor has a theory for the recent shift. “Something is happening in Western culture and media where there is an inflation of literally everything. There’s a looks inflation. A physique inflation. A height inflation. It’s getting to a point where you literally have to be six-foot-four, have a super giga-Chad jawline, and a jacked body just to even be looked at,” he says. “Everybody wants more. Like, nobody just wants to be normal. And it shouldn’t be that way.”
Before I end the Zoom call, I tell Taylor I need to know one more thing. He’s right, we do seem to be undergoing a looks inflation, but it’s also one he’s benefited from. He cracked the code. Returning to his earlier anecdote from the gym, I’m curious to know how else his life has improved.
Are you going on dates, having more sex?
He pauses and laughs. “To put it bluntly, yes.”
