I WAS IN NEW YORK having breakfast with a friend from high school and her kids, earlier this year. It was the standard middle-age catch-up – How are you? Who’s sick? – when I looked over at one of her boys, who was staring at his own reflection in an iPhone. The kid had sucked in his cheeks and was running a hand along his face. He looked like Ben Stiller in Zoolander giving Blue Steel over silver dollar pancakes. Except he’d never seen Zoolander and (I’m guessing) had no idea who Ben Stiller was.
“He’s doing his jawline,” my friend sighed, as if “doing his jawline” was somehow an explanation, before adding, “He’s mewing.”
The kid was 10. He didn’t have his own phone. And yet a TikTok trend called looksmaxxing had somehow seeped into his cortex. “Looksmaxxing” – and its cousins “auramaxxing” and “smellmaxxing” – refers to the Gen Z and Gen Alpha obsession with maximising one’s personal appearance in an effort to look more attractive. Some of these behaviours are pretty benign, like teenage boys storming Sephora in search of colognes touted by influencers like Jeremy Fragrance, who has nearly 10 million followers on TikTok. But if used improperly, other efforts – like a chewing gum that claims to sculpt a sharper jawline – may have potentially negative consequences beyond just bleeding their parents’ wallets dry.
Anthony Rossi, M.D., is a dermatologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and he can tell when a patient has been red-pilled by the Internet. “We’re noticing more and more people just coming in really scrutinising facial angles,” he says, adding that his colleagues have seen increasing numbers of younger millennials, and even Gen Z and Gen Alpha patients. “They’re angling their face – ‘Look at my profile.’ Some people will reference social media outright: ‘My profile looks bad in photos on Instagram.’ Or ‘I Facetune myself to look like this, and I want to look like that in real life.’”
Some government officials are clearly concerned. In October, following a more than two-year investigation into TikTok by a coalition of attorneys general, 14 states in the US sued the makers of the app, alleging it was designed to be addictive to young people and that executives intentionally misled the public about it. (TikTok’s own research indicated that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects,” including “increased anxiety.”) Around the world, other governments are being more proactive. Here in Australia our government has gone so far as to ban social media for kids under 16 years old.
In the past, I might have tuned out a very online trend like looksmaxxing, as I successfully did with, say, the “Hawk Tuah” girl. Maybe you feel the same way. But I regret to inform you that we can’t skip this one. Because looksmaxxing might be the key to understanding Gen Z and Gen Alpha behaviour, knowing where they’re headed, and, frankly, answering a larger question you’ve definitely thought about: Are young men okay?
CASEY LEWIS WRITES a popular newsletter called After School, chronicling Gen Z and Gen Alpha behaviours, and Fortune 500 companies regularly hire her to read the boba leaves. As she tells it, the word looksmaxxing grew out of the “pro-masculine” community. You know, the involuntarily celibate (“incel”) men who blame their romantic shortcomings on women.
The word first appeared in the dark corners of the Internet over a decade ago, before going mainstream in 2023. And to be honest, I’m disturbed by how early incel comes up in our conversation. “A certain subset feel like their masculinity has been threatened by society, or they feel less empowered or less seen,” Lewis tells me. “Men are really trying to lean into their masculinity – they’re protein maxing, taking supplements and steroids – because they feel like they aren’t able to be as masculine as they were born to be.”
You can quibble about what caused the shift. (A backlash to the #MeToo movement, maybe?) But if the recent presidential election proved anything, it’s that young men can’t be ignored. An obese 78-year-old didn’t become the face of hypermasculinity by getting McDonald’s delivered on the regular. He made this audience feel seen. And they responded in kind: In 2024, men ages 18 to 29 turned out in force for the Republican nominee, with Trump winning that demographic by 14 points – overturning a decades-long trend of young people leaning left.
Call it the new Red Scare. But another Reagan/Bush–era swinging dick has emerged as an unlikely Gen Alpha role model: American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, the yoked killer from the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel, memorably played by Christian Bale (and his cheekbones) in the film. Bateman’s an interesting cat. Before everyone was posting their get-ready-with-me videos on social media, he was out there narrating his morning routine, which included putting “on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches” and using an aftershave “with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face and makes you look older.”
In forums on Reddit and 4chan, looksmaxxers have coalesced around Bateman, whose well-moisturised face has become an extremely popular profile pic for self-described “sigmas,” a Gen Alpha term for independent men who prioritise power, class, and self-control, known to attract beautiful women aroused by their bank accounts. (A sample Reddit thread: “What can I do to be a Patrick Bateman sigma?” Or this one: “Patrick Bateman saved my life.”)
A far-right activist named Theodore Robert Beale coined the term sigma in 2010, a few years before he said women shouldn’t have the right to vote. But for young men, I suppose it’s nice to be part of a movement. Looksmaxxing is driven by the belief that each of us has the power to improve our romantic prospects despite the chin we were dealt. And at a time when this audience feels increasingly helpless, looksmaxxing at least gives them the illusion of control. Or as Bateman says in the film: “You can always be thinner…look better.” For many, that starts with “mewing.”
Though my friend’s son – the one staring at his own reflection in an iPhone – didn’t know it, mewing was named for Mike Mew, a controversial British orthodontist with a strikingly square jaw. But what fascinates so many TikTokers is how he got that thing. On a morning in September, Mew agrees to tell me that story over Zoom from his home in London.
The tale begins with his father, John Mew, who ran afoul of the U.K. medical establishment in the ’90s by claiming that traditional orthodontics was fundamentally flawed. Braces were designed to pull the lower jaw forward to meet the top jaw, he said, describing orthodontics as a one-size-fits-all solution to crooked teeth that’s not only detrimental to our health but also prone to result in relapse. (How many survivors of braces have later had to get Invisalign as adults?)
But braces also ignore a much bigger problem, the elder Mew claimed. Sometime in the last 200 years, he posited, the human skull changed for the worse. He blamed the advent of processed foods, which made chewing much easier, but whatever the reason, he said our skulls no longer had room for all 32 teeth, which led to a rise in sleep apnea, wonky smiles, and (worse) “ugly faces.” Want to see some nice teeth and a hot jawline? Forget Equinox; check out the Museum of Natural History.
John Mew promised he could fix all of that. His technique – which he named orthotropics – typically begins earlier than traditional orthodontics and involves installing a device in the mouth that makes more room for the teeth while also opening up the airways. He experimented on his children, according to an A24 documentary called Open Wide, and in lieu of scientific studies on orthotropics (there are none), the movement now puts forward Mike Mew’s own face as all the proof one needs.
And his jaw really is something – an exaggerated right angle that looks like it was drawn by a caricaturist. But he became an incel poster boy by putting the power back in the public’s hands. If you’re reading this – or watching one of his popular YouTube videos, which regularly reach millions of viewers – it’s probably too late for you to try orthotropics. But Mike Mew promises that you too can have his jawline with a little practice. All you have to do is press your tongue against the roof of your mouth for hours a day.
The chronically online have dubbed his technique mewing, and that hashtag has been viewed more 2 billion times on TikTok. As seen in the documentary Open Wide, Kim Kardashian has tried mewing. Apparently, mewing was pitched so many times in the writers’ room of the FX series English Teacher that the showrunner was forced to put it on a list of banned words, alongside overused slang like skibidi.
When asked about mewing, a representative for the American Association of Orthodontists sent me a lengthy statement that included this burn: “The scientific support for mewing’s jawline-sculpting claims is as thin as dental floss.” And “these trends, popularised on social media, raise significant concerns about their safety and efficacy.” It’s worth noting that John Mew lost his medical license in 2017 after being found guilty of making unsupported claims. Mike Mew, meanwhile, has been involved in his own litigation and was nearly forced to close his London practice after his initial insurance company dropped him. One of the first things he tells me is that he and his wife are living in a home paid for by their church.
But on the Internet, pissing off the Establishment is the surest sign that you’re doing something right. Mike Mew recently trademarked the term mewing in Europe and is now seeking similar protections elsewhere. Last Christmas, he also launched an app called Mewing by Dr Mike Mew. When I ask why he continues this fight – at the financial peril of his family – he concedes it would be easier to walk away. But he truly believes his family’s work can not just make people better-looking but also reduce sleep apnea, which in turn could raise a person’s IQ by 10 points, he claims.
“Self-interest isn’t driving me,” he says. “I want to make the world a better place.”
NEARLY A YEAR before Gladiator II stormed theaters, a photo of actor Paul Mescal went viral. He wasn’t drunk or romancing Gracie Abrams or doing anything all that newsworthy. He was standing on a street corner in New York City, holding a Sweetgreen salad, dressed in extremely short shorts with thighs for days. He was like Michelangelo’s David reimagined as an NFT.
He also looked like every guy at my gym posting selfies in their athleisure fits. I must have texted Mescal’s curbside thirst trap to a dozen friends. I guess I’m not alone. “Men are much more aware of physical appearance than they used to be,” says Keith Valone, Ph.D., a psychologist in private practice in Pasadena, California. “And they’re not embarrassed or shy or feel that it’s somehow strange or vain to talk about physical appearance. It’s a very common topic with my [patients] in their 20s and 30s.”
This isn’t new behaviour. Men have been concerned about their appearance since the first caveman saw his reflection in a puddle. But two things have changed. Cosmetic procedures have “grown exponentially in popularity with the development of social media,” says Joshua Zeichner, M.D., a dermatologist at Mount Sinai Hospital, “as more people are in front of the camera on a regular basis.” Terms like brotox have made their way into professional conversations, he adds. “As more men are taking to social media and are becoming more conscious of their appearance, I am seeing an uptick of patients coming into the office asking for jawline-enhancing procedures.”
But we’re not just staring at ourselves all day (though that would be concerning enough). We’re getting push notifications pointing out our flaws. As Mike Parent, Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in young male behaviour, explains, “Advertisers have done about as much as they can do to make women feel bad about themselves – and profit off of it. Now they’ve turned to men.” It seems to be working. Parent told me about a 2009 study on college athletes ashamed of their own bodies, proving that even a 20-something Adonis can feel insecure. Perhaps that’s why the bottle for a popular cologne, Le Male by Jean Paul Gaultier, is shaped like a torso with a bulging crotch.
And the pressure campaign is real. Within exactly one day of beginning my research for this story, my feed was flooded with ads for self-help products, including a workout routine designed to make my veins pop and another pushing ergonomic lifts. I also started to see a lot of ads for Jawliner gum, part of a new category of fitness chewing gums, which is 10 times harder to chew than a standard piece and is designed to tone the masseter muscles in your face. The founder of Jawliner, a German named Anton Perl, reminds me that he didn’t invent insecurity. If anything, he says, he’s selling a solution: “Any kind of motivation to change something on your body, I think, is always the best.” The company claims to have sold more than 1 million pouches of gum.
Thankfully, I wasn’t worried about my own self-esteem. I’m 46. I know what I look like. (Though I almost bought the lifts.) But what if I were 15? What if I were inadvertently training social media algorithms to prey on my own insecurities? Would I be one of those guys on Reddit, awake in the middle of the night, obsessively talking about my self-doubts from behind an avatar of a swole centaur? Where’s the line between standard-issue angst and body dysmorphia?
It’s a legitimate concern. Casey Lewis likens looksmaxxing to the “pro-ana” (or pro-anorexia) movement, in which young people struggling with eating disorders find one another online (cool) and feed off each other (not cool). “There have always been those guys” obsessed with their appearance, she says; it’s just that now “they have so many new platforms to meet.”
That’s how I found myself lurking on a site called Mogwarts Academy, which bills itself as a “School of Looksmaxxing & Profound Self-Improvement.” The name is a play on Hogwarts, the school for wizards from the Harry Potter series. But it also invokes the term mogging, youth slang for the art of intentionally standing next to a less attractive person in order to make oneself look hot. (I had to Google the word, and regrettably, the definition made me laugh out loud.)
Mogwarts is run by the beauty influencer Kareem Shami, who has more than 1.8 million TikTok followers, and his site operates on a subscription model: For 19 bucks a month, users get access to his online tutorials. Shami comes by his auramaxxing bona fides naturally. According to a New York Times story, he and his family fled the civil war in Syria in 2012 and landed in Beirut, where Kareem was teased for his light skin. Homeboy later mistook American Psycho for an instructional video, beginning a relentless transformation that involved (among other things) mewing. His TikTok and Instagram username? “Syrianpsycho.”
Intrigued, I spent some time on the Mogwarts site taking Shami’s Looksmaxxing 101 course, which includes tips on achieving “hunter eyes,” which are angled toward the nose to create a stare that young women supposedly find irresistible. I have no idea if that’s a thing. But if Shami’s own before-and-after photos are legit, the guy’s doing something right.
Mogwarts claims almost 3,000 paying members. But from an outsider’s perspective, the site appears to be more about the message boards than the curriculum. And like a teenager’s hormones, they’re extremely active. In one post, a chiseled 16-year-old shared photos of himself and asked users to “tell me everything you think I should improve,” which seemed dangerous to me. According to a report in The Conversation, that line of questioning is fairly common, and men who receive low scores on their “sexual market value” have been encouraged to take their own lives. Though this kid looked like a boy band heartthrob and was maybe fishing for compliments?
But a lot of the posts come from teenagers asking genuine questions, often about how to beat acne and improve their skin. And they’re met with sincere, almost emo feedback. It feels less like an AMA for basement dwellers and more like an online support group.
Still, I was starting to wonder if looksmaxxing might also be an echo chamber. Shami offers a live group call on Friday nights for subscribers, which struck me as an odd time to talk about maxxing. Isn’t Friday night when one should be out in the world testing these new skills? More important—and this isn’t a dig on Shami—shouldn’t men be talking to women about what they want? Was the Internet breeding misogynists? I was suddenly reminded of another of Patrick Bateman’s quotes: “There are no girls with good personalities.”
THE FILM VERSON of American Psycho came out 25 years ago, but Bateman’s influence lives on and there’s even a product called a Bro Mask (which an MH editor tested). Challengers director Luca Guadagnino just announced he’s working on his own adaptation (don’t say remake!). It was time for me to check in with some teenagers IRL. So I put out a call on Facebook and TikTok for young people interested in smellmaxxing and mewing. Within minutes, a dozen parents had replied offering up their spawn. (One typical response: “Drowning in cologne over here if you want to chat with Leo! But also, good luck talking to him while he fixes his alpaca hair and looks at his face in the mirror. Oh, and he is almost 12.”)
A 13-year-old from Montclair, New Jersey – a kid named Max – told me he heard about mewing on social media maybe a year or two ago. He tried it, he said, but “I didn’t really care for it,” which doesn’t sound like something a 13-year-old would say but I swear it is. “I know a lot of people say it’s supposed to fix your jawline. To see actual results, you have to do it a lot.”
When I asked if he knew anyone who was doing it a lot, he said no. “I think it kind of just became kind of a meme.” A joke. Maybe he was right. After all, one of the first jokes in 2024’s Ryan Gosling stuntman film, The Fall Guy, is about his jawline.
What was more remarkable about this call and the others was how at ease these kids felt talking about their own appearances and their skin-care regimens, which involved regular trips to Sephora. When I was a teenager, we all cared about how we looked, but to talk about it would have invoked a whiff of gay panic. In the sixth grade, I begged my mom for a pair of Z. Cavaricci shorts – the ones with the white label running vertically down the crotch. But I didn’t talk about those shorts in the cafeteria. But these kids I spoke to? They had no shame. And why should they?
Aidan, a 15-year-old high school freshman from Rutherford, New Jersey, got on fragrance tok last year after hearing kids at school talking about colognes over lunch. (And in the hallways, and in gym class.) “I wanted to be more involved in the conversations,” he says. After borrowing an Armani scent from his dad, he went on an expedition to the mall with his friends. Midway through our call, he schooled me on the difference between parfum and eau de parfum, between top notes and middle notes, sounding less like an incel than a parfumier.
Max was similarly fluent, having fallen down a social media rabbit hole, engaging with content from influencers like FragranceKnowledge, who gives honest reviews of colognes to his 1 million TikTok followers, sometimes joined by his grandmother. His government name is Evan, and I tried to interview him for this story.
“Sweet,” he replied, adding, “Right now I’m busy on a brand deal when I get back I can sure.” He signed it “V/R,” which I also had to Google. (It’s a military sign-off meaning “very respectfully.”) Later that day, he posted a photo of another influencer in an orange Lamborghini, the passenger seat piled high with colognes.
Aidan has about 18 colognes, he tells me, including the pricey Althaïr from Parfums de Marly ($365 for 125 ml), which he describes as a “mix of orange and vanilla,” adding, “It’s very unique.” He and his friends sometimes walk through Sephora or hit the counter at Macy’s, where they’re more liberal with free samples.
They’re in good company. As Sephora beauty director David Razzano tells me, “Cologne has long been one of the first steps a young man takes on his journey into finding his style and self-care. In the age of social media, many young men are now exposed to the power and status of luxury colognes, like seeing your first sports car and dreaming of obtaining it, but colognes are much more obtainable. Showing up to class in a soft cloud of Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male Elixir [$152], with its warm woody notes and touches of lavender, is a personal statement of maturity and sophistication.”
When asked about his generation’s obsession with cologne – check out MH’s favourites – and why it’s such a big business, Aidan explains, “I would definitely say it’s about confidence. And people always talk about how girls like it more when you smell good. So I think that was a huge influence on it.”
THE WAY AIDEN tells it, cologne is like a glamour – a spell designed to make one more attractive. And that’s maybe what this whole story is about. Because attraction is a confidence game. Even for my boy Paul Mescal, who made the mistake of posing with F1 drivers Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz at the UK premiere of Gladiator II. To be clear, I’d throw my entire life away for one night with Mescal, but standing next to those two, he looked less like a movie star than a giddy podcaster who’d won a free trip to London.
In the end, what concerned me most about young men and their obsession with looksmaxxing – and auramaxxing and their jawlines – wasn’t mewing but rather what led to mewing’s rise: a lack of media literacy coupled with a distrust of experts. (One could argue the same for that generation’s rightward swing at the ballot box.)
In 2023, a deepfake video of the podcaster Andrew Huberman went viral: He appeared to champion fitness gum’s ability to “alter the structure of your face.” The video was clearly doctored, but it had been reposted so many times – and so quickly – that Huberman was forced to post a denial on X, reminding his followers, “I have no financial relationship to any of those companies/products and do not endorse.”
Gazing into the crystal eau de toilette bottle of looksmaxxing’s future, Dr. Zeichner says, “While I hope the movement will go away, I don’t believe that will be the case. I think people will constantly be trying to improve their appearance in whatever way they can. I just hope in five years people will be doing it in a healthy and natural-appearing way.”
On the bright side, there are already minimally invasive ways to get a stronger jawline. In the aughts, I knew a guy who had a chin implant; the surgery was expensive and brutal, and until the swelling went down, he looked like Jay Leno. That was 25 years ago. Now AbbVie Allergan Aesthetics has Juvéderm Volux XC, an FDA-approved filler “to improve chin projection,” Dr. Rossi says, and you can probably have the procedure done over lunch.
If all else fails, you could also just grow a beard. Seth Rogen once shaved his face clean after years of growth; he said his beard had given him something he’d never had before: a chin.
This article originally appeared on Men’s Health US.
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