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Irish schools have been fully ‘infiltrated’ by the online subculture of ‘looksmaxxing’, a prominent activist for young people has warned.
And the trend is causing eating disorders, depression and severe anxiety among teenage boys, according to a leading child psychotherapist.
Looksmaxxing refers to men and boys – led by social media influencers – attempting to improve their physical attractiveness by enhancing features associated with masculinity.
Methods range from rigorous gym routines and steroid use to ‘bone smashing’ – where young males repeatedly hit their own face with a hard object in a bid to enhance the cheekbones or jawline.
Looksmaxxing is considered a spinoff of the ‘manosphere’, an online world that promotes traditional masculinity, usually with misogynistic and anti-feminist underpinnings.
Eoghan Cleary, a secondary school teacher and youth worker who gives talks to pupils around the country for the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute, told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘I would say Irish schools have been infiltrated in an absolute way by the idea of looksmaxxing and trends around it.’
Arguably the most famous 'Looksmaxxer' of them all is an online influencer who calls himself 'Clavicular' - and you can read all about him further down in this article...
He said he been hearing the term from students for a couple of years now – and that bone smashing is one of the two methods that ‘come up the most’.
While he has not heard a pupil admit to having tried it on themselves, he said they ‘certainly all know what it is and would all talk about it very fluently’.
‘There are tens of thousands of tutorials on TikTok and other social media platforms teaching kids how to use really hard implements – including tools from your garden shed – to hit yourself in the face.
‘Particularly along the jawline or on your cheekbones, with the false understanding that it will increase the bone growth in your face and give you the prominent cheekbones and jawline they’re being told they have to have to be a successful man in the world.’
Another common disturbing trend is ‘mewing’ – an unproven form of oral posture training which supposedly improves jaw and facial structure.
Mr Cleary said: ‘You think you catch them chewing gum in class, but they say, “it’s not chewing gum, it’s my mewing device.”
'That’s a piece of really stiff rubber that they put in between their teeth at the back of their mouth and chew it up and down with the misinformed idea that it will give them that prominent jawline.’
Other terms include ‘shadowmaxxing’ – which deals with looking good in certain light conditions and from certain angles – and ‘winter arcing’.
Mr Cleary explained: ‘It’s the idea that you hide yourself away for the winter and work out, starve yourself for as long as you can, and then when the summertime comes, you whip off your top and you’ve suddenly got this body of a 30-year-old bodybuilder on a 15-year-old boy.
'They’re told that this is what they can achieve, but, of course, they can’t.’
The teacher and youth worker mainly talks to 15 and 16-year-olds, but said looksmaxxing influencers also target younger children, including those still in primary school.
'LOOKSMAXXING': A GLOSSARY OF TERMSHardmaxxing: An extreme subset of 'looksmaxxing' that goes beyond lifestyle changes to include surgeries (rhinoplasty, jaw implants), injections (steroids, fillers), and controversial, techniques like bone smashing.
Ascending: When a former ‘incel’ uses looksmaxxing to improve their appearance.
Bone smashing: Taking a hammer to the face in an unsafe effort to achieve more chiseled features.
Mewing: Posturing one's tongue, sometimes using aids, in order to improve jawline definition and facial structure. Orthodontists say it doesn't work.
Chad: A muscular, handsome man presumed to sleep with a lot of women. Female equivalent: Stacy.
Foid/Femoid: A derogatory term for a woman.
Jestermaxxing: Tying to be attractive by being fun rather than obsessing over appearance.
Mog/Mogging: To one-up another man in physical attractiveness.
‘They haven’t fully grown, and the only way that they can get the definition that they’re looking for is just to starve themselves,’ he said. ‘So it’s actually emaciation that’s allowing their muscles to be seen.
'Fundamentally, young men are being told that their primary value is in how they look, and that they need to look a very specific way.
‘We were just getting to grips with the harm that that was doing to our young women, with regard to disordered eating and anxiety and depression and suicidal ideation as a result.
‘But now we’re seeing all of those things increase in young men as well, because if they can’t live up to these totally unachievable expectations that they’re being told they need to be a successful man in the world, then what’s their value?’
Child and adolescent psychotherapist Stuart Wilson and founder of Zestlife Therapeutic Services said there are ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ sides to looksmaxxing.
The more benign side encourages things like good nutrition, good sleep and exercise.
He told the MoS: ‘What we are seeing more so in the ‘hardmaxxing’ aspect is extreme eating, watching what you eat, a rise in areas of anxiety around intake of food, weighing of food, watching of food, disordered eating, protein promotion and creatine supplements.’
He said there is a ‘thin line’ between healthy gym use and the ‘extremities’ being pursued by many adolescents.
‘We have to keep an eye on that, because that vulnerability leads to potential anxiety and depression, because it’s always that thing of, “I’m never enough.” If you feel you’re not enough, you [look to] an external thing where people are affirming how you look.
‘Whereas what we’re always trying to do in the psychological world is to affirm the character of the young person – not their looks or their performance, but to promote their character.’
Mr Wilson pointed to the social isolation and increased screen time triggered by the pandemic as a driving factor of issues around looksmaxxing – and a spate of other harmful trends regularly dealt with in his practice caused by social media.
Stuart Wilson, pictured here with Olympic boxing legend Katie Taylor, pointed to the social isolation and increased screen time triggered by the pandemic as a driving factor of issues around looksmaxxing
Mr Cleary added that, just as the beauty industry has targeted insecurities for decades, influencers know that the ‘more insecure you can make a young person about their physical appearance, the more engagement you’re going to get from them, the longer they’re going to listen to you, and the more money you’re going to be able to make from them’.
He said: ‘Various industries have exploited this aspect of teenage girls’ lives for years, but now for the last couple of years, we’ve seen it move into targeting teenage boys with the same thing – to make them as insecure as possible.’
Those profiting from looksmaxxing are the companies selling quack products such as ‘mewing gum’, the influencers who are paid to promote the products and are also rewarded by social media giants for bringing traffic to their sites, and by the social media giants themselves, who make greater advertisement revenue from increased engagement.
‘The only reason [children] are allowed to become victims of this is that we have no regulation whatsoever on social media companies and what they’re allowed to feed into our kids’ lives,’ Mr Cleary said.
The most recent research by CyberSafeKids, an Irish charity which promotes online safety for children, showed that 77 per cent of children aged eight to 12 are allowed to keep a device with internet access in their bedrooms at night.
Mr Cleary likens it to letting a stranger into your home to talk to your children all night.
He said Louis Theroux’s recent Netflix documentary on the manosphere showed most of the key figures don’t actually believe what they espouse – and are only promoting for engagement and money.
He also warned the manosphere is no longer ‘some dark corner of the internet’ but ‘the mainstream world we’re currently living in’.
Teacher Eoghan Cleary said he been hearing the term looksmaxxing from students for a couple of years now – and that bone smashing is one of the two methods that ‘come up the most’
‘These are mainstream ideas that we used to see coming up from first and second year groups of boys who are 13 and 14. But now doing talks around primary schools, I’m hearing that they’re coming up in fifth and sixth class.’
Social media algorithms are set up to promote whatever keeps the user engaged.
A 2024 research project at Dublin City Uuniversity, which set up fake accounts purporting to be teenage boys found that ‘both those which sought out manosphere content and those which sought out gender-normative male-interest content, were fed toxic content within the first 23 minutes of the experiment, and manosphere content within the first 26 minutes’.
Mr Cleary said: ‘Before now, the only people that had access to young people during that vulnerable period were their parents, their friends and their educators.
‘But we have given the entire online corporate world access to our young people during this vulnerable period of life, in a way that is addictive.
‘So we’re providing an addictive product to every single young person in the world at a time when they are most susceptible to being exploited, most insecure about who they are, most in need of finding an identity and a sense of belonging.
'And the bottom line to all of it is that there is no regulation in place. So every single profit-making industry on the planet is allowed to make money out of our kids in whatever way they possibly can.’
CyberSafeKids CEO Alex Cooney also said children are being targeted by harmful algorithms for profit.
‘We know that children are being profiled by age and gender, and because of the way the engagement-based model works, they’re being served up certain types of content,' he said.
‘And for boys, it’s often related to masculinity, manosphere type things. It’s very difficult for your offline friends and family to counter when it’s that overwhelming.
‘And it is an artificial amplification [of toxic ideas]. It is not a reflection of real life. It is part of the design architecture, and it’s about engagement, which is, of course, about making money.’
CONTROVERSIAL LOOKSMAXXER AND ANDREW TATE ASSOCIATE 'CLAVICULAR' IN HOT WATERThe internet’s most famous ‘looksmaxxing’ influencer – known online as Clavicular – has had a busy few months.
It was reported on Friday that the 20-year-old, real name Braden Peters, is being sued for battery and fraud by a teen influencer in Miami.
Two weeks ago, he suffered an apparent overdose while live streaming to hundreds of thousands of followers.
The New Jersey native’s head rolled back as he sat in a nightclub with other influencers before the stream was abruptly cut off.
Members of the public filmed him being carried out of the venue.
The controversial influencer told fans afterwards: ‘I ain’t going to be doing any more substances for a little while, hopefully forever.
'All of the substances are just to cope trying to feel neurotypical while being in public, but obviously that isn’t a real solution.’
Respected Beverly Hills doctor Carlo Hondardo took to Instagram to say he's 'not a big fan' of what Calvicular is doing to himself, adding that it's made the influencer 'look older'. PHOTO COLLAGE: instagram.com/drhonrado
Days earlier, he made headlines for walking out of a 60 Minutes Australia interview after being questioned about his fraternising with Andrew Tate – one of the most notorious figures of the ‘manosphere’ and facing serious criminal charges in Romania, including human trafficking and rape.
In March, Peters was arrested in Florida along with his girlfriend in relation to an alleged violent attack on a 19-year-old woman.
In February, he was controversially hired to model at New York Fashion Week and profiled in the New York Times.
In December, he livestreamed himself apparently running over a pedestrian in his Tesla Cybertruck.
Before breaking into the mainstream, Peters was known in manosphere circles for his extreme body-optimising regiment.
The influencer, still not of legal drinking age in the US, says he began injecting himself with testosterone aged just 14.
He believes his regular steroid use has made him infertile.
He has used a hammer to ‘bone smash’ his face, and even crystal meth to suppress his appetite.
Despite his association with figures like Tate and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, Peters claims to be apolitical.
He has said he would vote for Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom for US president over JD Vance, because the latter is less attractive, or, in his own parlance, ‘subhuman’, with a ‘recessed side profile’.
He has even fired shots at actress Sydney Sweeney, calling her ‘malformed’ with a ‘recessed upper maxilla’ and ‘eyes of doom’.
Another controversial TikTok influencer in the Looksmaxxphere is Gym Memes, or milky_hohas.
One of his most recent posts was a short reel showing him hammering his own face under the caption, ‘Me doin my ONLY skin route’.
One of Gym Meme's recent TikTok posts was a short reel showing him hammering his own face under the caption, ‘Me doin my ONLY skin route’.
When a follower asked in the comments section asked whether the practice works, the creator responded: ‘In theory the bones grow stronger and bigger if they are broken, I can confirm my right elbow is thicker after breaking it.
'So the idea is that you make multiple mini fractures in the skull.’
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