Punishing regimens of facial exercises. Intentional starvation. Reshaping the jawline or cheekbones by smashing them with a hammer or chisel.

These are some of the more extreme behaviors in a practice called looksmaxxing – an effort to maximize one’s looks at all costs – that’s attracting an enormous following of largely teenage boys and young men on social media. Looksmaxxing has gone from niche to mainstream since trending on TikTok in the early 2020s.

Much of the media coverage of looksmaxxing has focused on cultural dimensions, such as the misogynist ideology underlying this trend and its implications for cultural conversations about masculinity. Meanwhile, looksmaxxers with an especially large following of hundreds of thousands of people on social media platforms like TikTok and Kick have attained pop-culture status.

But in the midst of this spectacle, the well-being of the young men participating in this trend has been largely overlooked.

From my perspective as a mental health professional studying how people think and talk about emotions and mental health, the behaviors associated with looksmaxxing look suspiciously like symptoms of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, also called body dysmorphic disorder.

These disorders are especially harmful to young people who are in the throes of figuring out who they are, what they want and how to navigate relationships – efforts already complicated by the pressures of social media.

In my view, platforming these young men and sensationalizing their behaviors, rather than recognizing those behaviors as signs of psychological distress, distracts from the urgent need to address these serious mental health concerns.

A blast from the past

The looksmaxxing trend repeats some troubling history.

A similar ideology emerged in the 2000s, but it was embraced and popularized primarily by young women and girls. Microblogging and social networking platforms like Tumblr and MySpace became hotbeds for advice on disordered........

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