Testosterone shots, chiseling jaws: Inside the world of 'looksmaxxing'
Dillon Latham grew up in a small town in Virginia feeling insecure about his looks.
What started as going to the gym and getting a perm turned into dermastamping or stamping his face with micro needles, all part of the world of "looksmaxxing."
"I don't actually understand how people can't see the reality that is the better you look, the better you're treated and the more power you have, but it was just obvious to me," Latham told ABC News.
ABC News Studios' "IMPACT x Nightline: LOOKSMAXXED" is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
Looksmaxxing is a self-improvement practice focused on maximizing physical appearance, which was coined on "incel" -- a portmanteau of "involuntary celibate" -- message boards in the early 2010s.
The term did not gain widespread notoriety until mostly male content creators began discussing it on social media platforms, such as TikTok, in the early 2020s.
The practice can range from regular body care routines, such as getting a haircut or moisturizing the skin, to more extreme measures, such as abusing steroids or hitting bones in one's face with objects to get a more "chiseled look."
The most well-known looksmaxxing influencer is Braden Peters, a 20-year-old known online as Clavicular, who shot to popularity for his content on TikTok.
Clavicular has said in interviews that he takes testosterone as well as the medications dutasteride and minoxidil to prevent hair loss. He said he's even taken methamphetamine as a stimulant and to lose weight.
Some doctors say these methods are dangerous and the medications people are taking may have unintended consequences.
"If you take a lot of these hormone blockers like dutasteride, which is supposed to be for hair loss, it's just going to stop your genital development," Dr. Terry Dubrow, a plastic surgeon and co-host of the series "Botched," told ABC News. "When you use these things in an unregulated way, when you mix them with street drugs as they're doing out there, now you're getting what we call polypharmacy where he's mixing and matching various drugs that he's learned about on the internet."
He said it boiled down to "uneducated, unlicensed, 20-year-old-and-younger influencers giving medical advice to teenage boys."
"It's unregulated, it's dangerous, and fundamentally, it really just doesn't work," he said.
Two YouTube channels associated with Clavicular were recently terminated, the company told ABC News.
A spokesperson for the video-sharing site said in a statement that Clavicular's original channel was terminated in November 2025 "for facilitating access to websites that violate our Illegal or regulated goods or services policies."
Since YouTube's terms of service prohibit creators from creating or owning new channels after a termination, the company removed two additional channels associated with Clavicular, according to the spokesperson.
Despite the recent popularity of "looksmaxxing," Tefi Pessoa, host of the podcast "Tefi Talks," argues that it's not a new concept.
She said women have been "looksmaxxing," or chasing extreme beauty standards, for decades and men are only recently catching up.
"It's definitely funny that men had to come up with the brand-new terminology in order to justify the fact that they're doing what women have been doing forever," Pessoa told ABC News.
