The Truth About LooksMaxxing

There is nothing wrong with looking online for tips and tricks about fitness, hair, fashion, skincare, health, and confidence. But it’s important to spot the difference between good, healthy tips that work for teenagers, versus scams by influencers who use shame to increase your anxiety and make money.

LooksMaxxing refers to various ways to increase your physical attractiveness — usually quick fixes like mewing, taking pills, and buying several expensive products to use regularly. Oftentimes, LooksMaxxing influencers use shame to make people feel bad about who they are – they play off everyone’s insecurities and increase anxiety about body image. Then they exploit how they made you feel to sell gummies, pills, penis pumps, or other products with zero evidence that they work.

The online personalities pushing these products are often making money off their sale, so they have an interest in convincing you that you aren’t good enough. They also make money off of video views, so they keep coming up with new LooksMaxxing techniques that they insist you have to do.

It’s a cycle that harms you and benefits them. Here’s how:

1. You search for videos about how to work out, or style your hair, or create an outfit that looks good (nothing wrong with that!)
2. But you find LooksMaxxing videos from online influencers who make you feel bad about yourself (they make money from the views).
3. You buy their products (again, they make more money).
4. Their products don’t work. Their recommendations are impossible to do. You feel shame and anxiety that you can’t meet the impossible standard they invented.
5. You find new videos with different methods and different products.
6. You watch those videos and buy those products (and they make money off of you again).
7. And around and around it goes.

It is great to improve your health by exercising, eating nutritious foods, getting enough sleep and staying hydrated. There are some things about our bodies and our fitness that we can change, but there are some things – like our height and our jawline – that we cannot control. When looking for tips online, try to find two or three different sources saying the same thing before you believe it. If a video is talking about bodies using shaming words like “ugly,” “gross,” “disgusting,” or promising that their tips will change your body in an exact amount of days or weeks (think, “Get 6-pack abs in 5 weeks”), that might be a LooksMaxxing video you don’t want to watch. Finally, if a video tries to sell you products that they insist will work (using words like “definitely”, “guranteed”, or “works every time”), then that is probably a scam, and you should find a different video.

To be clear, it’s important to focus on your health, fitness and wellbeing to help feel better emotionally, mentally and physically. Feeling good about yourself and your health can also help you feel more confident and more desirable as a potential romantic partner. Focusing on your well-being and self care is healthy, but not when it becomes extreme with a hyperfocus on your appearance. It is great to challenge yourself to get in better shape, eat healthier foods and try to be your best self, but it can cross a line into unhealthy when expectations are not realistic and people can take advantage by trying to sell you fake products that don’t really work.

It can help to try and focus on the positive things about yourself – inside and outside – and do your best to live a healthy lifestyle while also not hyperfocusing on things outside of your control. A person who is happy and confident is most attractive to others, no matter what their appearance is like on the outside.