Looksmaxxing emerged out of the depths of incel forums to become one of Gen Z’s largest cultural movements. Today it is probably one of the most famous Gen Z terms.

Yet as a system of philosophy it is full of contradictions, so much so that those who hate it, and those who love it, are probably both wrong about it to some degree.

If you hate looksmaxxing and think it’s shallow and fake, you are probably wrong. Looksmaxxing can be deeply authentic and empowering.

If you love looksmaxxing and consider yourself a hardcore looksmaxxer who’s engaging in a productive endeavor. You are also probably wrong. Chances are, looksmaxxing is holding you back.

Today I will explore these contradictions, and who knows, there might be more to looksmaxxing than the memes.

But first let’s define the term. Looksmaxxing simply means maximizing one’s physical attractiveness. It includes “benign” activities like grooming and going to the gym. It also includes the more “extreme” methods, such as pharmaceutical drugs like steroids, and plastic surgery.

Of course, Gen Zs did not invent the project of becoming physically attractive. Homo Sapiens have attempted to make themselves look better probably ever since we were living in caves.

What makes looksmaxxing different is the system of ideology around the movement.

For example, a proper Looksmaxxer tends to treat physical appearance as something to be objectively measured, engineered, and optimized. It takes this old human desire to be attractive, and turns it into a full-blown project to be systematically pursued.

From the outside, this can seem superficial. There’s something about pursuing external appearance in such an explicit and shameless way that can often rub people the wrong way. It feels unnatural, fake, and inauthentic.

In fact we often implicitly place moral weights on what is ‘natural’, as if to be natural is to be virtuous. But if someone manipulates their appearance artificially, then that is unnatural and inauthentic. And the person who is natural is morally superior to one who is not.

But does our bias towards naturalness survive scrutiny?

You see on a basic level, when we say that something is natural, we mean that it occurs in nature in a way that’s absent from human intervention.

When we say something is authentic, we mean that it is true to who we are as people, that it's an honest expression of ourselves.

So oddly, by definition, what is natural and what is authentic are often mutually exclusive. Meaning you cannot usually be natural and authentic at the same time.

For example let’s say my face is natural. That means that what you see here is a product of nature. It’s genetics that’s given rise to this bone structure and the soft tissue around it. This face has not been altered by me, or a plastic surgeon or a makeup artist or any other humans.

So my face is natural because it’s absent of human efforts. But because it’s absent of human efforts, it cannot be authentic.

After all how could it be an authentic expression of myself when I have taken no part in its creation.

I did not choose this face. I did not make this face. I did not alter it in any way. I simply find myself having this face. So this face is not an expression of who I am. Rather it’s an expression of randomness.

To illustrate, let’s look at this rock. I found it outside earlier when I was touching grass.

This rock is a product of nature. Humans did not create it nor alter it. So it’s natural.

To illustrate, imagine this rock next to my face.

Both my face, and this rock are natural. As such my face is as much an authentic expression of who I am as this rock is.

I find myself having this face just as I find myself having this rock. They are both expressions of randomness. Both are natural, neither is authentic, because my self is equally absent in both of them.

Now I’m not saying my natural face is inauthentic. What I am saying is that it is authentically irrelevant. In other words we can’t say whether it is an authentic expression of anyone’s self because there is no self in it to authentically express.

But what if I was wearing makeup. Say before I started recording, I took some time to choose a set of makeup that would alter my look. I then put the makeup on my face using makeup skills that I acquired through years of practice.

Now my appearance is no longer natural. But it is an expression of my agency. Because I was the one that chose to look this way, and I was the one who created it. So now we can begin to argue about whether it is authentic.

Did I use makeup to create an appearance that conforms to a set of social norms that I did not believe in, well then you can probably argue it’s inauthentic.

Did I choose this look despite the social pressure, because I think it better reflects my value. Well then you can probably say that it’s authentic.

Either way, you can only begin to make moral arguments on authenticity about my face when my face is a result of my human agency and effort, which usually also means that it’s unnatural.

This is the first paradox of looksmaxxing. I call it the Authorship Paradox.

Most of the time, you can only begin to say whether an appearance is authentic when it is authored, which is to say unnatural. As such the very thing that makes looksmaxxing seem shallow, namely the deliberate human effort to manipulate appearance, is precisely what can make it authentic. And ultimately, what makes looksmaxxing shallow or authentic depends on how one does it.

Now you might notice that in practice, people don’t usually use words this precisely when they are just living their lives. When a normal person speaks words like ‘natural’, they don’t mean literally natural. In fact there are many unnatural interventions that we routinely use to manipulate our appearance that we consider totally natural and acceptable.

Take haircut as an example:.

“I get haircuts regularly. I’ve been doing it my entire life. In fact I just got a haircut last week”

Upon hearing this no one here will think that I am unnatural or superficial or fake.

But what if I replace haircut with Botox?

“I get Botox regularly. I’ve been doing it my entire life. In fact I just got botox last week”

That feels different now doesn’t it.

But why do haircuts get a pass while Botox doesn’t. After all neither procedure is natural.

Hair doesn’t cut itself in nature, haven’t you noticed. Wrinkles don’t disappear on their own either.

In fact, haircuts and Botox share quite a few parallels.

In both cases I seek out professionals who use modern tools to remove unwanted parts of my natural biology.

The effects of both procedures are also naturally reversible. If I stop getting haircuts, my hair eventually grows back. If I stop getting Botox, my wrinkles eventually grow back.

So what exactly makes us consider haircuts to be natural but not Botox?

Well it’s just vibes. We are making these social judgements based on vibes.

There is no clear ontological boundary between the aesthetic procedures that we consider acceptable and those we don’t. We are simply socialized into feeling this way.

In other words, we happen to live in a modern culture where hair manipulation for aesthetic purposes is more socially accepted than wrinkle manipulation.

But if we were born into a different culture, we could feel very differently about these procedures.

For example, there’s a point in ancient Chinese history where haircut was taboo. This was a Confucius thing related to the concept of filial piety. The hair was thought to be received from one’s parent and cutting it off would have meant disrespect towards one’s parent.

So no one cut their hair back then except in very niche contexts. For example haircut was used as punishment for certain crimes.

In other words people found haircuts to be so aversive that it was literally used as a deterrent for criminal behaviors.

So you can imagine what would happen to someone who lived in that society and decided to start getting regular haircuts for purely aesthetic reasons. People would be horrified to see someone cutting off their hair just to look better. And they would judge that person as unnatural and superficial and fake, even more so than how we judge Botox users today.

Now the fact that our society places moral weights on what is natural, and arbitrarily judges certain manipulations of natural appearance as socially unacceptable, has real consequences. This is because physical beauty, in its natural form, is not evenly distributed.

Let’s take my face as an example again, so we don’t offend anyone. If you like my face, I can’t take credit for it. If you hate my face, I’m sorry you feel that way, but I can’t be blamed for that either. That’s what having a natural face means. I was not consulted during the construction phase of this project.

The story goes that a few decades ago, two adults decided to mix their genes. That was a consensual thing but only between them. I was not there to give my consent, because I didn’t exist yet. Still, decades later, here I am, living through the consequences of their action. I’m not complaining about what happened, I’m just stating what happened.

My appearance, in so far as it’s natural, is entirely a product of luck, and that is the case for every human who currently rocks their natural face.

Now even though we did not cause our natural appearances, we are living through their consequences. And most of us would have noticed these consequences from as early as when we were kids.

Do you remember that some kids were more popular in school than others. How difficult was it to figure out why some kids were popular in class while others weren’t getting as much attention. Most of the time it’s immediately obvious.

As we grow older, our appearance continues to matter. As much as we want to deny it, the research on this is clear.

There are studies from as early as 1993 that found that good-looking people tend to earn more than ugly ones.

We can call this beauty premium for the purpose of our discussion, and we’ve only gotten more confirming data about it since then.

In particular, a study from 2012 found that attractive applicants got 36% more callbacks in job interviews. They acquired this through a field experiment so the result looks causal not merely correlational.

Looks matter in dating as well. That fact is self-evident. Just look at the people you would like to date, observe what they look like, and see if you can spot a pattern there.

There’s even a study that found physical attractiveness to be negatively associated with depression.

And another that theorizes a causal loop between physical beauty and mental well-being, where the more beautiful you are the happier you are, and the happier you are the more beautiful you appear. But if you are ugly the causal loop can go in the opposite direction.

Now there are nuances in these data; in the job market for instance, you tend to observe beauty premium more in jobs that have interpersonal components. So if you don’t work with people at all, your appearance may not matter as much.

But generally speaking, looks matter in life. It matters more in some context than others. But to say that looks don’t matter at all is for the most part statistically wrong.

People don’t like hearing this, because it seems to take away their agency to some degree.

As we said, natural beauty is a result of luck, so we don’t control it. Yet it matters, so we are forced to live through its consequences. If one is blessed with beauty, one gets to enjoy its benefits. If one is cursed with ugliness, one must endure its costs.

But why do we have to let the tyranny of luck dictate our life in this way. Why not use our agency to change our fate?

Well we have been doing that, kind of, just not fully openly. This is because we are also subject to an additional layer of tyranny in the form of social judgements, which, as we have discussed is arbitrary. We can do things to change our looks, but societies have decided that only certain methods are acceptable. You can get haircuts, but not botox. You can work out with protein powder and creatine, but not steroids.

Looksmaxxing then, in the best case, is a revolt against these tyrannies: the tyranny of luck and social judgement. Looksmaxxers recognize that looks matter and that natural beauty is random. But instead of sitting around and mope, they decide to take back their agency by changing their looks through any means that work while radically ignoring the social judgements that follow.

In other words, it’s an attempt to do in the open what people have done in secret. And it does so while telling the world to go fuck themselves.

This is why looksmaxxing can be both authentic and empowering.

And on that note it sounds like a worthy project to me. Inspiring, even. But does that mean we should all start aggressively looksmaxxing now? Well not so fast.

I did mention that this was a paradox?

Looksmaxxing can be authentic and empowering. But it can also be mentally destabilizing and strategically counterproductive. One can go from one side to the other quite rapidly. And the thin line that divides these two sides is something called critical thinking.

You see beauty premium is real, but beauty omnipotence is not.

Putting it simply looks matter but it’s not the only thing that matters, and in many areas of life, looks are nowhere close to the main things that matter.

For example let’s say my toilet breaks and I need a plumber. How much do you think I care about what my plumber looks like.

Now some looksmaxxers might make you believe that I would pick the better looking plumber because the halo effect from the plumber’s jawline will trick my brain into thinking that he is more competent than his uglier counterpart.

They might even start recommending plumbers to get jaw surgery as career advice, claiming that the beauty premium that comes from a better appearance will pay off the cost of the surgery over the course of their career.

But if we apply some common sense here, how much do you think I actually care about my plumber’s appearance when my toilet is currently broken.

Well not only do I not care what my plumber looks like. I hardly care that my plumber looks human. Even if my plumber belongs to a totally different species, as long as it has a better track record of past performance while commanding a more reasonable price, I will pick it over its human competitors regardless of how magnificent those human jawlines are.

Now you might think that I’m exaggerating with this plumber example, because surely no looksmaxxers in real life would think this way.

Well let me introduce you to Clavicular, or Clav, who is currently the biggest influencer in the looksmaxxing space.

Now I have no beef with the guy. I don’t intend this next segment as a personal attack to him. What I want to do is to make an objective analysis on life strategy and Clav is a good example for this because he is the biggest voice in looksmaxxing and as such is representative of at least some of the world view in this community.

Now Clav looks like this, quite good-looking, I would say, but he wants to get jaw surgery.

Why indeed. It’s quite an invasive surgery and costs $35k. If he already looks this good, why spend so much money and take such health risks to look marginally better.

So it’s not personal. It’s not like Clav feels insecure about his face and wants to improve it. Rather Clav considers this as an objectively optimal financial investment. You’ve got 35k and you can put it into stock, bonds, gold, bitcoin, or double jaw surgery. And Clav believes that the jaw surgery is the best option.

Many looksmaxxers talk about their project in this way. It’s less like a personal thing to improve their appearance, but more like a cold, rational analysis of reality, as if they are making a financial investment.

The problem is that looksmaxxing is very different from financial investments.

You see financial investments are difficult because you are making decisions about the future with imperfect information. No one knows the future. No one knows which stock will go up in value tomorrow. Despite that you need to make the decision today.

But at least, the results of your investment are clear in hindsight.

If I buy a stock today and sell it tomorrow, when tomorrow comes, no one will be confused about whether my investment is a success. Like, did I get my money back or not? Did I make or lose money on this trade? The numbers are clear as day.

But for looksmaxxing decisions like the one Clav is talking about, forget about making a successful decision for the future, you can’t even judge whether the decision is successful in hindsight.

How would you know that the jaw surgery is a financial success. How would you measure that.

Let’s say Clav gets the surgery and then makes more money afterward. How do you know that the extra income is a result of him being slightly better looking, and not a result of him working hard in an industry like social media where success is exponential.

And suppose he makes less money after the surgery. How would you know that that is evidence that the surgery is a failure? Maybe he makes less money because of some totally unrelated setback, like he said something wrong on stream and got cancelled. In that case, perhaps you can say that if he didn’t get the surgery, his career downturn would be even worse. So the surgery is still a success.

To say that a $35k surgery is a good financial investment because you’ll make your money back through the beauty premium, is a causal claim. You are claiming that becoming slightly better looking will cause your life to become better. It’s also a quantitative claim. You are claiming the amount of improvement in your life will be greater than or equal to $35k.

But in practice, it is almost impossible to single out the causal effect that becoming marginally better-looking has on one’s life, let alone quantify it. In other words, the claim is practically “unfalsifiable”

So when a looksmaxxer talks about their project using the language of logic like this, they are not employing real logics with rigor; they are LARPing at logics.

In reality, incurring this much cost to become marginally better looking is not a decision supported by evidence. But why do some looksmaxxers still do this?

I’m going to call these people looks maximalists. These are looksmaxxers who obsess over their looks past the point where it is productive. They incur serious money and risks to chase marginal improvements in their appearance even though it is no longer supported by logic and evidence.

The question is: why are they doing this? What do they want?

Well, in the case of Clavicular specifically, there is actually a good reason to do this. For him, it's a productive social media strategy. But the key word there is for him, specifically.

Clav is a very good-looking person who’s built a brand around looksmaxxing. If someone like that publicly announces that he wants to become even better-looking by cutting his face open, and then goes through with it, that is such a shocking and extreme act that it is likely going to generate a massive amount of attention, attention that he will be able to monetize and profit from as a social media influencer. And this is going to happen regardless of the actual result of the surgery. It would still work, even if the surgery makes him look worse afterward. In fact he could get even more attention if the surgery fails.

In other words, the surgery is profitable as a public stunt project. I don’t know if Clav has ever framed the surgery decision in that way, but that is the way in which it does make sense financially.

But it only makes sense for him or someone in a similar situation to him. It wouldn’t make sense for most other people. If I get that surgery, none of you would care. If you get that surgery, probably no one would care either.

But there are looksmaximalists who are not Clav, who are not public figures with a unique monetization angle, yet they still chase marginal improvements in their appearance with the same rigor.

And that is where the paradox flips, where looksmaxxing goes from something that moves your life forward to something that holds you back.

You see, physical appearance has a relatively hard biological limit. One can usually reach that limit relatively quickly.

If I have been living like a slob, it’s quite easy for me to get a lot of productive looksmaxxing done in a short span of time. I can lose the weight, hit the gym, change my diet, sleep well, get a haircut, and buy clothes that fit, etc. These are the low-hanging fruit of looksmaxxing. And they are well worth doing given their low cost. I can begin picking most of these off within a few months, and likely observe my life becoming better as a result.

But after I have done all that, there isn’t much else I can do unless I’m ready to start making bigger sacrifices. To looksmax further at this point, I might need to consider things like steroids, plastic surgery, bone lengthening surgery, etc.

In other words, I have exhausted the low-hanging fruit, and am now running into the hard limits of human biology. Breaking through these limits would necessitate increasingly higher cost in terms of money and health and time. I’m not saying they are never worth pursuing for anyone, but on average they are harder to justify based on data.

Many reasonable looksmaxxers would probably get off the ride at this point. But a looksmaximalist might decide to stay with their ideology to the end of the earth even though their efforts are becoming counterproductive.

Now for a subset of looksmaximalists, this can be a feature, not a bug. These biological hard limits are the very thing they are looking for.

You see if I don’t like my life, but it is not my fault, that is a much easier reality to live with than if I don’t like my life and it is my fault. The first case is tragic but at least I get to complain. The second case on the other hand demands me to take responsibility.

With a looks maximalist worldview, when I don’t have the life I want, I can easily blame that on my looks. And I can blame my lack of progress on the hard limits of biology.

So my life isn’t getting better because I’ve done all I can with looksmaxxing given my genetics. To go further I’ll need $35k for jaw surgery and I don’t have the money right now. That’s why my life isn’t improving.

In other words, by hiding behind the comfortable excuse of looks maximalism, one can avoid doing the hard work that creates real improvements in one’s life.

That is the strategy paradox of looksmaxxing. What starts out as a productive revolt against luck and social judgement can turn into an excuse for inaction, and becomes the very thing that holds one back.

And what makes the difference between productive looksmaxxing and counterproductive looks maximalism, might just be this ephemeral thing called ‘critical thinking’.

It’s the ability to evaluate your endeavor dispassionately and decide whether it is worth pursuing based on evidence instead of emotions.

And that is hard to do in looksmaxxing, because our appearance is something we can get emotional about easily.

Since most of us identify with our appearance, it makes us sensitive around topics related to it. As a result it’s harder to stay objective and clear-headed when thinking about endeavors like looksmaxxing.

In some sense, we are shallow creatures. So much of what we care about, in ourselves and others, is only skin deep. We do judge books by their coverss. We do it compulsively. We can’t help it; but we are also not willing to acknowledge it.

So we develop a variety of coping mechanisms to guard ourselves against facing the uncomfortable truth of our shallow nature. And that is in part what gives rise to all these paradoxes of looksmaxxing.

But refusing to face the facts does not change the facts. Ironically when we do begin to face the facts, we realize that they are not that bad.

Yes we are shallow creatures, but we are not merely shallow, are we. We are also capable of profound depth. Indeed it’s a paradox.

First of all, yes we judge books by their coverss. But what’s wrong with that. You are supposed to judge books by their coverss. That’s what covers are for.

Authors don’t spend years writing a book just to slap a random image on the cover. Most writers spend time, energy, and money, working with publishers, graphic designers and other professionals to create a book’s cover. Nothing on that cover is random. The author has carefully arranged each element on the cover, to convey specific information about the book to you. This is information that you are meant to receive. If you don’t judge books by their covers, what’s the point of all that work.

We choose how to present ourselves to other people through our appearance, the same way authors choose how to present their books to readers through the covers. So in that sense, it’s fair game to judge people by their appearance as it is to judge books by their coverss.

And secondly, we don’t only judge books by their coverss, do we. Because at some point we start reading them. After all who buys books just to stare at their covers. Most sane people buy books to read them, right? And after one reads the book, one pretty much forgets about the cover, and begins judging its content.

That analogy applies to much of human relationships. When we meet someone for the first time, we judge them by their appearance, because that’s the only information we have about them. But once we get to know them, we begin judging them by the content of their characters, because now we have more information about their characters.

In fact the more we know someone, the less we judge them based on their appearance. And if I know someone extremely well, then their appearance becomes irrelevant. Like if my mother gets a complete makeover or plastic surgery tomorrow, my opinions about her won’t change, because I simply know too much about her. This is like how a book’s cover becomes irrelevant once you finish reading the book.

Now this book cover analogy is not perfect. One place where it breaks down is that unlike the covers of books, which are 100% within the author’s control, our appearance is not. We can change some of it, but we eventually run into biological limits as we discussed.

That is why people say don’t judge others by their appearance. People’s appearance is not 100% aligned with how they would like to present themselves, because much of it is not within their control.

Like I’d love to present myself as a gigachad but I’m working with biological hard limits.

That’s why we should give people some grace and wait to form opinions about them until we’ve gotten to know them.

However, science and engineering in human aesthetics are improving, in some areas, exponentially. Technology is getting better at manipulating human appearance, through better pharmacology and surgical techniques and so on. In this way the frontiers of biological hard limits are receding. If we assume some positive rate of improvement in this area, given enough time, we will eventually get technologies that can manipulate human cells at an atomic level with low cost and near perfect safety margins.

At that point, human appearance will become like the covers of books, where it is 100% within our control. At that point our faces will become like an online avatar that we can fully customize.

That future might sound dystopian. You might imagine a universe where everyone is shallow and aggressively beautifying themselves to the end of the earth.

But the exact opposite can also happen. This is the last paradox I’ll leave you with. I call it the scarcity paradox.

When we can control our appearance completely, we would be free to choose our looks as much as we choose our words and actions. In that sense our appearance can become a much more accurate reflection of our characters, and it would make more sense to judge people based on looks.

But ironically, in that world, there’ll likely be fewer people who judge others based on looks. Since anyone can be physically beautiful, mere physical beauty would no longer be scarce, and we would cease to be enchanted by it.

Instead, we would have to look for what is rare beyond each other's skin, to find the deeper rarity in the content of our characters, or that which remains impossible to engineer artificially.

So paradoxically, a world where we can control our looks completely might just be one of much more depth than the one we have now.

Personal Adornment. n.d. (https://carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/personal-adornment)

Beauty and the Labor Market. 1993. (https://www.nber.org/papers/w4518)

New Study Unveils Career Impact of Attractiveness: Higher Salaries and Prestigious Roles Over Time. 2025. (https://www.informs.org/News-Room/INFORMS-Releases/News-Releases/New-Study-Unveils-Career-Impact-of-Attractiveness-Higher-Salaries-and-Prestigious-Roles-Over-Time)

The Labor Market Return to an Attractive Face: Evidence from a Field Experiment. 2012. (https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/6356/the-labor-market-return-to-an-attractive-face-evidence-from-a-field-experiment)

PubMed entry on physical attractiveness and depression. 2023. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37572706/)

PubMed entry on physical beauty and mental well-being. 2023. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36729742/)

NBER Working Paper W24479 on beauty premium and interpersonal work. 2018. (https://www.nber.org/papers/w24479)

YouTube clip discussing double jaw surgery. n.d. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQaMZceY-0I&rco=1)