Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Images: Eric Robert—Sygma/Getty Images, Lion's Gate/Getty Images)

Fay Bound-Alberti is a professor of history at King's College London and the author of "The Face: A Cultural History."

May 2, 2026 11:00 AM CUT

Young men in bathrooms and bedrooms fix themselves on a scale via social media communities . Then, they agonize over their appearance and devise “soft” and “hard” ways to improve it.

Welcome to the era of “looksmaxxing, " which has taken over the manosphere and is creating a new aesthetic vocabulary in the process.

Underpinning it is a purportedly “objective” scale of attractiveness, based on such traits as “facial harmony,” balance, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism, to rank people on a scale from zero to eight, with eight being the highest (aka, in looksmaxing parlance, a “Giga Chad”) and zero the lowest (or what the phenomenon terms “subhuman.”)

It doesn’t stop there; there are subcategories. Soft looksmaxxing involves skincare and grooming, fitness, and diet.…