Blog Post 4

 Looksmaxxing and the Reshaping of Beauty

    What does it mean when people start treating their own faces like something to be engineered? The looksmaxxing movement, popular by influencer Clavicular might seem like an extreme pursuit of beauty but it reveals something that is much deeper about the influence of social media. When looking at Clavicular and the looksmaxxing movement from McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message, the movement can be understood as a set of harmful practices and the product of the digital environment a lot of us live in. When McLuhan argues that the media reshapes how we act, think and perceive the world this helps us understand that social media creates a system of constant visual comparison where bodies are reduced to measurements, rankings and sexual market value. This way looksmaxxing is now about how digital media transforms the body into something to be optimized, controlled and reworked instead of being about individual choice. 

    This idea becomes even clearer when looking at how the movement operates in everyday digital spaces. I have personally come across Clavicular’s content on TikTok and through that exposure, the logic of looksmaxxing feels less distant and more normalized. A friend of mine even knows someone who appears in his livestreams, and while he noted that Clavicular’s online persona is more exaggerated, he is still deeply invested in rating faces and breaking them down through mathematical measurements. This reflects McLuhan’s argument that media alter the balance of the senses, shaping how individuals perceive and interpret the world. This way social media prioritizes visual data, encouraging people to see themselves and others as images that can be analyzed, compared and improved. The body is no longer experienced in a embodied way but instead through a detached, calculated perspective shaped by the digital environment. 

    The looksmaxxing movement also reflects a key idea in Canadian communication which focuses on the unintended consequences of media environments and the wats they shape human behavior beyond our control. In his Playboy interview, Marshall McLuhan explains that people often remain unaware of the psychic and social effects of new technologies.(McLuhan, 1969) In the case of looksmaxxing this is shown through the normalization of extreme and harmful practices like bone smashing to alter facial structure and even the promotion of drug use like microdosing methamphetamines to maintain a certain appearance. While these actions may appear to be individual choices, they are shaped by the pressures of the media environment where users feel compelled to modify themselves to meet digital standards. This shows the bigger consequence of social media than instead of just expressing identity, individuals begin to restructure their bodies and behaviors in response to technological systems they do not fully recognize or control.  

    To better understand the looksmaxxing movement it can be understood through McLuhan's idea that the content of any medium is always another medium, which challenges the assumption that trends like looksmaxxing originate purely within social media. This is seen in the contrast between looksmaxxing and older ideas of beauty, like the concept of jolie laide, which describes individuals who are considered attractive because of their unconventional or asymmetrical features. (Rothfeld, 2026) While this earlier understanding of beauty values uniqueness and imperfection, social media reorganizes these ides into a system based on measurements and numerical ranking. By doing this the medium introduces a new scale which changes how beauty is understood and evaluated. This can be seen in the way appearance is increasingly quantified, measured and compared across digital platforms. The result is a new and simplified version of existing ideas where complexity is reduced in favour of optimization. This demonstrates how social media transforms cultural ideas into extreme forms, shaping behavior in ways that reflect the logic of the medium. 

    Clavicular’s content also reflects what Marshall McLuhan describes as the way media “works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio” (McLhan, 1969, pg. 238) , particularly in how it reshapes perception.Clavicular teaches his audience to see faces differently, breaking them down into angles, proportions and numerical values. In the article, his focus on rating systems and measurements demonstrates a way of looking that prioritizes calculation over subjective experience. This suggests that social media influences what people think is attractive and changes how they visually process and interpret the human face. 

    The looksmaxxing movement shows how deeply social media shapes cultural standards of beauty and the way individuals experience their bodies. Through Marshall McLuhan’s ideas, it shows that this movement is about appearance or self improvement and the influence of the medium. From the normalization of extreme practices to changes in perception and beauty standards, looksmaxxing reflects the influence of digital media environments. Clavicular and his followers demonstrate how people begin to think and behave according to the logic of the platforms they engage with. Lookmaxxing highlights McLuhan’s idea that media actively shapes reality.

McLuhan, M. (1969). The Playboy interview: Marshall McLuhan. Playboy Magazine.

Rothfeld, B. (2026, March 7). The captivating derangement of the looksmaxxing movement. The New Yorker.