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00:19How's that?
00:20Good.
00:21If I walked into a room and I saw my male partner heating himself in the face with a hammer,
00:28absolutely not, stay right where you are.
00:30I know what you are, looks-max-er.
00:33It's a term you may have never heard before, looks-maxing.
00:37The trend can range from superficial practices like hairstyle and skin health to serious measures
00:42like breaking bones in your face.
00:47Looks-maxing is an online subculture dedicated to ascending which means basically just getting
00:53hotter.
00:54Mostly very young men, teenage boys, who go to extreme lengths to improve their appearance.
01:01I started taking the steroids and I'd say it changed my life.
01:04Elements of this have become really mainstream.
01:07We're talking about it on the news.
01:08They're making fun of it on SNL.
01:10I'm absolutely frame-mogging you into oblivion right now, dude.
01:15But it's not exactly all positive.
01:19Looks-maxing emerged out of incel forums.
01:24Guys who feel sexually frustrated, those forums were extremely misogynistic, nihilistic, hardcore.
01:30Bone-s-mashing, steroids.
01:32I think everyone should be on testosterone.
01:34Influencers giving medical advice to teenage boys.
01:39It's a complete and total disaster.
01:42Social media influence are known for looks-maxing is back in the spotlight.
01:46Clavicular hit an apparent overdose here in South Florida.
01:49It really makes you wonder who young dudes are looking up to these days.
01:53Who they're actually lifting up.
01:54And the idea that the line is blurring between self-love and self-hate.
02:16I don't actually understand how people can't see the reality that is the better you look,
02:22the better you're treated, and the more power you have.
02:25But it was just like obvious to me.
02:29So, my name is Dylan Latham.
02:31I am a looks-maxing slash life-maxing creator.
02:34I help people improve by giving them tips.
02:37And my main focus is to improve everyone's life.
02:44My day starts around like 2 p.m.
02:48As soon as I get up in the morning, I go to the mirror and I do whatever it takes
02:54to look better.
02:55I use makeup.
02:57I use Vaseline.
02:58I use various oils.
03:00People always say don't care what other people think.
03:02I think the only way to operate is discovering what people think and then capitalizing off of that.
03:11I grew up in Virginia, small town.
03:14I was always different from everyone.
03:17When I was younger, I wasn't too insecure until I was made fun of by family members about the way
03:26that I looked.
03:26And from that, I became very deep-rooted in insecurity.
03:31I was slightly like overweight when I was younger.
03:35So, being like fat, whatever.
03:37My hair was really long, so people called me emo for that.
03:40Even though there were jokes, it definitely got to me.
03:42And I took it as, alright, how can I fix this?
03:48The first thing that I did to start improving my appearance was going to the gym.
03:53And then I started dermis stamping my face, which is something I went viral for, where I would stamp my
04:00face with needles.
04:01Very important that you keep this needle clean, otherwise you will literally fry your face.
04:06Thirdly was, and this is the most viral thing, was getting a perm.
04:09Here's the final review.
04:12What do y'all think? This is kind of crazy.
04:14And the perm actually was a huge glow up.
04:16I looked way better.
04:17But that simple ascension made me viral and almost gave me a career, I would say.
04:25Looksmaxing emerged out of a few forums that were popular in the early 2010s that were incel forums.
04:34Incel meaning involuntarily celibate, as in guys who feel that due to their appearance
04:39or due to some aspect of their life, they will be sexually frustrated forever.
04:45It's not exactly the same as the looksmaxers, but there's a through line.
04:50There's DNA that has passed through and some of those same people have traveled sort of from one circle to
04:57the next.
04:59Understanding looksmaxing's rise within the broader economic and political context, I think requires us to look at a few different
05:09things.
05:10One is the nihilism of the young boys who participate in this, who say that they don't have a clear
05:18path to a quote unquote normal middle class life.
05:22Gen Z and especially teenagers, they went through the pandemic, they maybe sort of missed a year of school.
05:29They are not used to having social relationships in the way that older people are.
05:34From the early 2010s to around 2022, 2023, looksmaxing was extremely, extremely secretive.
05:43It was sort of fight club rules, so to speak.
05:46The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club.
05:49That changed with the rise of short form video.
05:54TikTok, Instagram reels.
05:55It also produced a certain number of looksmaxing influencers, celebrities.
06:01But by far the most popular or most notorious is Clavicular.
06:07I took one for the team last night and I fucked an ugly girl.
06:10Clavicular is a 20 year old guy's real name is Braden Peters.
06:14He's from New Jersey and he sort of came to online fame because he was at top of the leaderboard
06:23of looksmaxing.com.
06:25When he was 14 years old, he kind of felt like an outcast and he took to the internet and
06:29found the looksmaxing community.
06:30I spent a lot of time on bodybuilding forums growing up.
06:33I started with 300 milligrams of testosterone and I did that for a while up until I was 16.
06:39And then I experimented with a couple of orals.
06:42He does live streaming on the app Kik.
06:45He's really blown up and clips of his video streams have proliferated on TikTok and all sorts of other social
06:52media platforms.
06:53Streamers just have crazy names.
06:55You can think of MrBeast, iShowSpeed, but a name like Clavicular makes you do a double take.
07:01Clavicular comes from the idea of how wide should your clavicle bones be, which is something that most of us
07:06have probably never thought about.
07:07Because I'm trying to optimize every single metric of my life.
07:10I'm not only interested in fitness, right?
07:12I am trying to IQ max, I'm trying to money max, like all these different things.
07:18Obviously, you know, for the normies watching this, I say max at the end of everything, maximize, just for that
07:25clarification.
07:27Here's some of the key terms to know for looksmaxing 101.
07:30Soft maxing and hard maxing would be sort of your two broadest categories.
07:36Soft maxing could be as simple as plucking your eyebrows, trying to lower your body fat percentage, doing your hair
07:44differently.
07:45Hard maxing is what they are referring to for things like actually getting plastic surgery, limb lengthening, bone smashing.
07:53This is how bone smashing got me this.
07:57Which is repeatedly hitting sensitive parts of your face with a hammer to try to grow the underlying bone and
08:04change the look of your face.
08:05It doesn't work, alright? Bone smashing is a fallacy. It's fraud.
08:13Mogging means that when you're in a group of men, the most looksmaxed, the best looking person in the group
08:20will mog everyone else there.
08:22They will have the status, they will have the attention.
08:24If I am six foot eight and someone's five foot ten, I height mog them.
08:30If someone is less attractive and I'm more attractive, I facially mog them.
08:38Mewing comes back to a dentist named Dr. Mew.
08:42And the technique is you hold your tongue in a certain position in the mouth, creating stress like this in
08:50the jaw muscles.
08:52I almost think it's like a flexing of the face. Let me see.
08:59Was that a mew?
09:01It doesn't work. So it's just a dumb idea. It's dumb maxing is what it is.
09:13This is the official Chad rankings website where people literally rank Chads.
09:19So for me, for example, I'm the number 24th ranked Chad.
09:22A Chad is basically someone who mugs having a square jaw, having a square chin.
09:29People will likely consider you a Chad if you have good ratios.
09:32On the PSL scale, I would say I'm about a four out of eight.
09:35The PSL scale is the preferred rating system for looksmaxers to assess their facial attractiveness.
09:43PSL uses a one through eight scale.
09:46Ones will be your supposedly least attractive people.
09:49The area between seven and eight will be people who are almost mythically attractive.
09:56The top PSL moggers people talk about, one would be Sean O'Prye.
10:01He's a model.
10:02Another one would be Matt Bomer.
10:03People love to talk about Jordan Barrett.
10:05I can look at my face and see this picture.
10:07I could have better coloring.
10:09I could be tanner.
10:10My eyes could be lighter.
10:12My neck could be wider.
10:13My cheekbones could be more prominent.
10:15I have a lot of things that I could work on.
10:23I wrote an article about the PSL scale for GQ.
10:26I contacted raters who used the PSL scale to get an actual rating of my own face.
10:32Here's one I have right in front of me.
10:33I sent him my photo.
10:35He responds, I gave it quite a thought, bro.
10:41So I sent them photos of myself and they ran their whole analysis on me.
10:46I gave it quite a thought, bro.
10:48I'd say 4.25.
10:51Low tier normie, basically.
10:53So that means four, right at the dead center of our one through eight scale.
10:58He's basically saying I'm average Joe.
11:00The soft maxing advice was to get lean AF, thicken the eyebrows, join the gym, get that
11:07V taper dialed in, and then you have the hard maxing.
11:10The main flaw is jaw recession.
11:12Biomax double jaw surgery, jaw and chin, implants, fillers, and then we get my photos.
11:22This photo he generated shows me with the thicker neck and the wider, stronger jaw.
11:28And how did that make you feel?
11:30I think you'd be lying if you said there wasn't some little part of you that's like you hope
11:35they give you some amazing score and you're like, wait, really?
11:38I'm so incredibly handsome and I never knew, but I'll take middle.
11:42And you have to remember also that this is just some random kid on the internet.
11:46You can't really care about it.
11:51Can we get a wave?
11:54I think when you look at the Kardashians and their rise in media, we live in an attention economy now.
11:58We're the best way to make money and have power is to control people's attention.
12:06If your body is your brand, the best way to have a bigger brand is have a better image, which
12:11means you're going to have to looks max yourself.
12:12Everybody wants to look better.
12:14In this video, I'm going to be giving you guys 13 ways to improve the way you look for completely
12:18free.
12:19It's very natural and normal to want to look better.
12:23They're turning to many of the same ways of getting control over themselves and their future that women have with
12:28maybe an eating disorder or bulimia.
12:30I've always said being a woman feels like you're almost pretty.
12:34If you bought one more thing, if you lost this, but if you gain that, you could be pretty.
12:40It's definitely funny that men had to come up with a brand new terminology in order to justify the fact
12:44that they're doing what women have been doing forever.
12:50So I use a lotion based self tanner to fill in any gaps.
12:56Having a slight tan on any part of your physique is going to bring out your muscular definition.
13:02So I try to put it anywhere where I want more definition.
13:08So now I have a waterproof mascara and first, actually, I use an eyelash curler.
13:15So by curling the eyelash, it's going to go up, concealing that upper eyelid exposure, alluding to a better eye
13:25area.
13:28Apply this under the eyes in this zone here.
13:33I don't actually think people see me as one of those extremist looks maxers who is harmful.
13:39Like people don't really say that I'm similar to clavicular.
13:43People actually say I'm the antithesis of someone like him.
13:47I have more followers than Clav, but he's more culturally relevant by a lot.
13:52What matters is people posting you, people talking about you.
13:56Everything he does is on the extreme. So that's what people want to see.
14:02The algorithm rewards over the top behavior and extremes.
14:07He's gone, he's gone.
14:09The more attention they get by acting the most outrageous, the more views, the more clicks they get,
14:15which will translate into financial reward for them.
14:19Clavicular has said that he has been making about $100,000 a month.
14:23There's a lot of money that can be made simply live streaming if you can get a lot of eyeballs
14:29on your live stream.
14:30There are no holds barred on clavicular streams.
14:33It seems like he does everything that you wouldn't do on camera on camera.
14:38I mean, he's committed sex acts. He said racial slurs. He's even smashed his face bone smashing.
14:45So my whole regimen is as follows. For growth, for the gym, I'm taking testosterone every single day
14:53because I'm taking a very short ester of testosterone to keep my hormonal profile most in line with what it
14:59would be as a natural.
15:00I take minoxidil for my hair. I take dutasteride for my hair. That's my hair protocol.
15:06I also take Accutane. I take 7.5 milligrams of Accutane a day.
15:10I use crystal , so methamphetamine as a stimulant and to lean max, right?
15:17If you take a lot of these hormone blockers like dutasteride, which is supposed to be for hair loss,
15:23it's just going to stop your genital development. When you use these things in an unregulated way,
15:30when you mix them with street drugs, now you're getting what we call polypharmacy,
15:36where he's mixing and matching various drugs that he's learned about on the Internet.
15:41You're getting uneducated, unlicensed 20-year-old and younger influencers giving medical advice to teenage boys.
15:52It's unregulated. It's dangerous. And fundamentally, it really just doesn't work.
16:00I heard Claf say this once. He said that there was a way to get to your goals faster and
16:06achieve the things you want.
16:07Why wouldn't you take that route? I kind of agree with that in a lot of ways.
16:26When I really wanted to start improving my looks, it was about a year ago.
16:29I was more just fat and just more insecure about myself.
16:34I just took it upon myself to start working out and, you know, taking the diet more serious, taking the
16:40gym more serious.
16:41So that's when I started taking the steroids, and I'd say it improved my life for the better.
16:48My name is Zaid. I'm a senior in high school. I'm 17 years old. I live in Dallas, Texas.
16:55A lot of influencers would just come up on my feed, like Claf, and it kind of like inspired me,
17:01I'd say, to want to improve my looks.
17:04I like Claf a lot just because the way he speaks, you know, he doesn't really care what other people
17:08say.
17:09He's really open. He doesn't have a filter. I really like people who are like that.
17:14This is testosterone. I always used to be afraid of New York, but after like the first time, it's kind
17:19of like actually easy.
17:21My parents weren't really too happy when they found out about it, but I kind of sat them down, had
17:26a talk with them.
17:27This is something that is like a life decision, and it's not something you can just really come off of.
17:34It's like it's a commitment, you know, and once you start, there's not really any going back.
17:39So I'm not concerned about the future. I'd say too much of anything is bad for you.
17:45You know, too much alcohol is bad for you. Even drinking too much water can be bad for you.
17:50I think there's always limits to certain things, and if you just do it the right way, you won't really
17:56harm yourself.
17:57I'd say.
17:58The problem with looks maxing is it's designed to make kids, teenagers, young boys look as good as possible.
18:07One of the main things they do is they use steroids.
18:09So although you might get muscular hypertrophy, you can get high blood pressure, an increase in your LDL, a decrease
18:17in your HDL,
18:18all of these cholesterol parameters, so it can have a paradoxical effect on their health and wellness, and they're very
18:25dangerous.
18:28I think the danger of Clavicular specifically as this figure in media right now is that purportedly he's getting all
18:35this attention because he's looks maxing.
18:36And I think if you are a young man or a teenage boy following him, you might think, oh, okay,
18:41if I look maxed too, I'll have the fame he has.
18:43It's sort of a behaviorally induced body dysmorphia, meaning when you're trying to look as good as possible, having as
18:52many surgeries as possible, it's just never enough.
18:55They're pursuing an unobtainable perfection that doesn't exist.
19:00With enough time and enough procedures, enough drugs, you're going to run into a complication.
19:09Rescue 16, trying to respond, 20-year-old male, overdose.
19:12Now a social media influencer known for looks maxing is back in the spotlight.
19:16Clavicular had an apparent overdose here in South Florida.
19:20During a recent stream, he was slurring his words.
19:24Oh my God, I must listen.
19:27He's sitting next to another streamer, androgenic, who sits next to him and he asks him just, how messed up
19:32are you?
19:33How fucked up are you?
19:34Dude, I'm shot.
19:36So after the stream cuts, you see this video of Clav being carried out by a group of people and
19:40he looks completely limp.
19:42The next thing you hear is he's been hospitalized.
19:45Wow.
19:49It's sort of tragic.
19:51The more that you learn about this kid, you do feel empathy for him.
19:55He's sad.
19:57Clavicular's OD may be an inflection point, a tipping point in the looks maxing movement.
20:04Hopefully, people realize mixing and matching these things is particularly dangerous.
20:10Clav tweeted out that the experience was brutal, but that next night...
20:15Tonight, I'm on nothing. I don't plan on being on anything for the foreseeable future.
20:21He was back at the club, live streaming.
20:25Set following!
20:36Yeah, on looks maxing. You guys looks max?
20:38Oh, yeah, yeah.
20:39We look max, hello.
20:40I'm trying, I'm trying. I'm looking like getting into it right now.
20:42Locked in, bro, bro.
20:43Before I was watching Clavicular, I was looking like subhuman.
20:46You're ascending, you're ascending, bro. Let's go.
20:48W moggers, W moggers.
20:49Bless up, bless up.
20:50You too, bro. Peace, peace, peace.
20:51People DM me all the time saying that I changed their life, that I saved their life,
20:56that if they didn't find my content, they wouldn't know what to do with their life.
21:01Bone smashing, though, it doesn't, it's a coke. It's a coke.
21:04It's good for like getting a pump, but other than that, it's pride.
21:07Most people, 99% of them, I would say fit on the side of soft maxing.
21:13They will never get surgery, use pharmacology, inject steroids or anything like that.
21:21One thing people are really obsessed with recently is the use of height boosters.
21:26Height boosters are just like inserts you put in your shoes.
21:29That's crazy, but like you'll get found out, right?
21:31Like the second you take those shoes off.
21:33Yeah, so when you take the shoes off, you just got a vantage point max.
21:37So like around your apartment, if you have a girl or anything, you just throw down some stuff to like
21:42stand on that vantage point as you take off your shoes.
21:45And then by the time you're like sitting down or like you're horizontal, you know, it doesn't matter anymore.
21:53I mean, these men are all getting the idea of what women want, not from in real life experiences, but
21:57from other men who don't know what women want.
22:01I've never ever thought about a man defending me against an intruder or fighting a lion or defending my honor
22:09in the Coliseum.
22:11I think about someone who I'm going to grieve with.
22:14I'm going to share my problems with that I need support with.
22:20Well, I think the irony of looks maxing is that sure, the idea is to help you get women, but
22:24it seems like once you get into the community, that's so unimportant.
22:28Ultimately, the idea that you would be home alone spending hours and hours a day getting hot so that a
22:34man you've never met online in a basement could be like, yeah, you're a nine.
22:41Thinking of looks maxing as a way to get girls is a very outside in way of looking at it.
22:48The first thought, of course, is, oh, they want to have better luck with girls at school, but that's often
22:54not the motivation.
22:55It's actually just life treatment. I don't really think it's misogynistic to improve your looks.
23:02But even if it were for the sake of women, it's just, it's literally just not. It's for the sake
23:07of improving your overall life.
23:13People show me way more respect now. You know, when you have like a status, I'd say people just talk
23:20to you differently. They kind of like more look up to you in a way.
23:24I think this mainstream popularity or attention on looks maxing might be the worst thing that ever happened to looks
23:33maxing in terms of its survival.
23:35If your parents know what looks maxing is, it's not a very appealing way for you to express yourself.
23:42There is always a new subculture for teenage boys that the adult world finds frightening.
23:50It could be punks, goths, emos. There is always some new moral panic that seems to be affecting lonely young
24:00men.
24:01And my theory is that looks maxing is just the latest in a long chain of similar things.
24:07Beauty will not keep you safe from life. And for some reason, because of the highlight reel and the obsession
24:14with comparison online, and we only see people's good days,
24:17I think that boys think that if they are attractive enough, they never ever have to feel a bad feeling
24:23again. It's not true.
25:02It's just the reality of pretty hard for me, getting rid of the gray hair, but it's not true.
25:05Just a good idea.
25:07That the pain isn't really dangerous because the pain is almost a big one.
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