Two days before he ended up in hospital, Braden Peters walked off the set of 60 Minutes Australia. The 20-year-old, known online as Clavicular, had sat down with reporter Adam Hegarty to explain looksmaxxing, the internet movement he's become the literal face of. Personally, I think Tracy Grimshaw would have been the ideal person to ask the hard questions, but I guess we can't have everything.
The interview went fine until Hegarty asked whether he identified as an incel. Peters didn't answer. He told the journalist it was the worst run of questions he'd heard, offered to teach him how to looksmax instead, and left. Two days later he was hospitalised for a suspected overdose during a livestream, after months of openly discussing the Adderall, steroids and testosterone in his routine.
The reaction came fast, and it felt familiar. What is wrong with young men? What is the internet doing to them? And how did we get here?
It's a fair set of questions, even if they were mostly asked in bad faith. The honest answer is that we know exactly how we got here. We've been getting here for decades.
What we're calling looksmaxxing isn't a strange new thing that crawled out of TikTok. It's the logical endpoint of a culture that has spent a long time telling people their appearance is a problem, then handing them steadily more powerful tools to fix it.
Reality TV got here first
Before looksmaxxing had a name, it had a TV slot. It started gently, with the romcom makeover where the 'not so pretty unpopular girl' would get her hair straightened, whack on some lippy, and take her glasses off. And BAM. All of a sudden, heads were turning. Then it escalated. Because, before too long, we got Extreme Makeover. The Swan. Botched. A whole genre built on one premise: here is a person, here is what's wrong with them, here is the surgical journey that makes them whole. Reality television didn't just show us cosmetic surgery. It gave it a story arc, a soundtrack and a happy ending.
And it worked. The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery counted around 38 million cosmetic procedures worldwide in 2024, up 42.5% in just four years. For most of that history the pressure landed on women. Looksmaxxing is just the moment young men got folded into a script women have been handed for generations.
A package holiday with a scalp scar
To see how normal this has become, look at Istanbul. Roughly a million people a year travel to Turkey for hair transplants, feeding a $2 billion industry served by an estimated 5,000 clinics in that one city. Walk the tourist districts and you'll see them, men with bandaged, freshly dotted scalps posing in front of the Hagia Sophia.
We've turned cosmetic surgery into a bookable long weekend. Flights, hotel, procedure, a bit of sightseeing while you heal. Long before an algorithm served anyone the word looksmaxxing, we'd invented the wellness break with a side of rhinoplasty.
It didn't start as skincare
Set the scalpel aside, and the same urge turns up everywhere, just under gentler names. Call it wellness, skincare, biohacking, longevity, or self-care. Gwyneth Paltrow built an empire somewhere between jade eggs and serums made of ingredients you'd struggle to pronounce. And then there are the men with too much money who are spending a house deposit every year to slow their own ageing, and being admired for the discipline. None of that gets shamed though, and mostly it shouldn't be. It's vanity with a marketing budget, and vanity is fairly harmless.
Looksmaxxing wears the same gentle names. But it didn't exactly start as a skincare routine. The word comes from incel forums, the online communities of mostly young men who believe women are out of reach for them, and that a man's worth is decided by his face. In that world a jawline isn't vanity. It's a score in a ranking system, kept by people who are bitter about where they sit in it.
None of this means a jade egg and an incel forum are the same thing. They obviously aren't. One is a slightly ridiculous corner of consumer culture. The other is a worldview built on resentment of women. The reason looksmaxxing matters is that it lets the second travel under the friendly vocabulary of the first.
Which is why Hegarty's incel question wasn't a cheap shot. It was the obvious question. What's happened since is that TikTok has sanded the ideology off the surface and kept the worldview underneath. Most teenagers mewing in the bathroom mirror haven't read a word of blackpill theory. But they've absorbed its central claim anyway, that your face is a problem to be scored, ranked and solved.
Looksmaxxing is about to look quaint
The tools are about to get far more powerful, and far harder to see.
AI photo editing already lets anyone preview a sharper jaw or a fuller hairline in seconds, and a touched-up selfie is increasingly the brief a patient carries into a surgeon's office. Weight-loss drugs have changed our relationship with our bodies.
And so, that friction that once sat between wanting to change how you look and actually doing it is disappearing. Today's looksmaxxing, with its spreadsheets and supplements, will soon look almost charmingly low-tech.
Which brings us back to that interview, and the hospital bed two days after it.
It's tempting to file Clavicular away as either a victim or a villain. Some of the alarm is well earned. A 20-year-old cycling steroids and stimulants is in real danger. And an ideology that ranks young men by their faces and teaches them to resent women is worth taking just as seriously.
Sure, it's easy to say he is a troubled kid chewed up by the internet, or a misogynist who got what was coming. Both are too easy, and both let the rest of us off the hook. Because the reality is, he's neither exceptional nor innocent. He's what happens when two things meet. A consumer culture that spent decades teaching everyone to treat their face as a project, and an online ideology that taught young men to treat it as a scoreboard and blame women for the score. We built the first in plain sight. We built the clinics, ran the shows, sold the serums and booked the flights. The second we mostly ignored, filed away as fringe, and assumed it would stay there.
He followed the logic all the way to a hospital bed. But the logic was ours long before it was his.