Looksmaxxing and the Quantification of Culture

We've staunchly been in the realm of the facial hyperreal, where most celebrities or influencers we encounter online have utilized filters or FaceTune in order to make their faces look better on social media. Today's looksmaxxing movement radically proposes that the virtual is not enough; we must actually look like our avatars.

Looksmaxxers are willing to go to great lengths to achieve this idealized beauty: strict diet regimen, using methamphetamines as hunger suppressants, gray market peptides, fat dissolvants, human growth hormones, illegal testosterone, and even bone-smashing (tapping one’s face with a hammer to sculpt it). In its contemporary form, looksmaxxing emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s from the margins of male-dominated Internet subcultures, particularly threads on 4chan and adjacent forums that would later splinter and crystallize into incel and “blackpill” communities. Currently, most of the actual in-community conversation happens on Looksmax.org, while discourse engendered on social media is spread through the viral dissemination of clips taken from the quasi-quotidian streams of the movement’s most popular figures, like Clavicular, Androgenic, and ASU Frat Leader.

Clavicular and the rest are doing what not even Sophie, the late electronic musician, could have dreamed of. In her song “Faceshopping”: “I'm real when I shop my face.” Clavicular’s response? “I'm real when I smash my face.”

These online spaces have developed taxonomies of attractiveness with quasi-scientific precision: craniofacial ratios (the distance between different parts of the face), canthal tilt (the angle of one’s eye corner), jaw projection (the position of the lower chin), philtrum length (the distance between the bottom of the nose and the top of the lips). Online, users dissected one another’s faces as if they were architectural diagrams. There are now even apps where you can get an AI to tell you which ratios are off. I tried one, and I’m sad to report, I’m chopped.

Looksmaxxing is contemporary because it articulates, in distilled form, our new condition: the self is a project that we can align towards an invisible statistical norm. In other words, the body is something to be continuously enhanced like the stats of an RPG character.

Notably, this isn't what New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino termed “Instagram Face”: that concept is much too passé, too millennial, by which I mean, it is based on perception of the self as a rendered entity presented onto a screen. The platforms where Clavicular and looksmaxxers present themselves are not the still algorithmic feeds but the messy unedited always-on stream, which are much closer to real life. A recurring plot line in a stream is an encounter between two looksmaxxing streamers and the loser usually suffers from a “cortisol spike” due to the stress the other “mogger” (term used to describe someone whose beauty surpasses that of another individual) has engendered. The language used is both highly embodied and quantifiable. They do not speak of mental states. They speak of physical hormonal reactions which they can measure and optimize. If Instagram was the age of the image, the age of Facetune, the age of Photoshop, the age of presenting a static self, the age of the vibe, then looksmaxxing is the radical acceptance of bodily reality and our capacity to quantify it.

It’s been three centuries since the first calipers measured a set of craniums in order to assess and assign moral and intellectual capacities under the now-discredited discipline of phrenology, but the dream of a direct correlation between facial features and virtue did not die. It stayed alive and well in the margins of society.

The reason looksmaxxing has gained popularity in the last months is not because suddenly we are fascinated by beautiful faces. We always have been! It’s because the quantification of everything has finally gone mainstream. Looksmaxxing’s claim, now that it is front and center in the zeitgeist, is that aesthetics can be broken down, measured and quantified. It rhymes with our obsession with data in culture: fans speak of music streaming numbers, movie box offices, auction results in fine art. There is a teeming and strange proclivity to tag all elements of life with a sensor and extract data from them, across acting, beauty, and, even, fashion. What gets quantified can be subsumed into the zone of control of technology, what gets quantified becomes legible by machines; the quantification of everything is the machine’s logic applied to human life, and all its previously uncaptured intricacies.

Ineluctably, from the logic of quantification emerges financialization. The Golden Globes this year had an integration with Polymarket and displayed betting odds throughout the ceremony. Soon enough, we’ll be able to build parlays about which celebrities wear J.W. Anderson’s Dior to different award red carpets. Everything is a number and every number gets financialized.

More and more people are treating fashion like it's Moneyball, the 2011 Bennett Miller film starring Brad Pitt where a data analyst first introduces data-driven sports management to a losing baseball team. You can tell some people are betting on designers early to say that they got in first. Part of it is the cultural capital that comes with saying “I was here first!” or in my parlance, “Been Had Polo!” Part of it pre-empts the fact that there will be money to be made from being first. The logic of financialization is more than economic: when we treat culture as something that can be charted, something that can be won, that can be counted, we flatten it, turn it into yet another fungible artifact in the avalanche produced every day. Desecration by data.

Looksmaxxing is the new form of this desecration. The face is the new site of measurable optimization. If the face is the front of the shop, then the shop is empty, a mere shell. In some ways, the nightmare of Videodrome and The Ring has come to life. An evil monster inhabiting the screen is now really haunting us. Armed with calculators and rulers and metrics and data and numbers, it’s killing culture, art, beauty, pleasure, soul, and leaving our beautiful perfect optimized looksmaxxed bodies intact.

Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, cyberethnographer, and artist based in New York. He is a professor of Design and Media Theory at New York University, and his work has been featured in publications like the New Yorker, Artforum, and Art in America.