Stephen Imeh wanted to make history. He’d never really dreamt of being an influencer, but in April he noticed an opportunity to break through.
There were virtually no looksmaxxers—people who spend enormous amounts of effort to glow up—who looked like him, and he wanted to change that. So he made a plan. Imeh posted a workout video on TikTok, with plans for more, and updated his bio to “FIRST BLACK LOOKSMAXXER.”
But as soon as the 20-year-old Houston-based college student posted the video, he was bombarded by racist comments. “I don’t think even an hour went by and I was getting comments like, you’re a monkey, you’re an n-word hard r,” he says. Another comment suggested Imeh “just be white,” or “jbw” as it’s known in incel circles. None of it made sense to him. “I was like, wait, what?”
It wasn’t Imeh’s first encounter with looksmaxxing, the online movement most prominent among young men that emerged from incel culture and took off on TikTok in 2023, which promotes maximizing your physical attractiveness. In 2022, Imeh was a junior at a predominantly white high school in Texas that only had “three other Black kids,” and he wasn’t fitting in. He decided to search for self-improvement tips online. “I googled ‘How to look better’ and the number one thing was looksmaxxing,” he says. Suggestions included a tongue exercise called mewing, working out, healthier eating habits, even plastic surgery. Imeh only lasted two weeks before he called it quits. “It was kinda cringe.” But because it happened the year before looksmaxxing blew up on TikTok, he says, “I didn’t tell anyone about it.”
In the three years since that experience, looksmaxxing has become more popular than ever, and Imeh, currently studying to be a speech therapist, wanted to give it another shot. Maybe he could be the face of a Black looksmaxxers trend, he reasoned. But he felt the ecosystem had become even more toxic in his absence. “The community before, it wasn’t as bad. But it spawned a new wave of people.”
The ordeal in April was a wake-up call. Today, Imeh posts anti-looksmaxxing content to his 36,000 followers. “I’m obviously not included in this community, so why would I keep trying to contribute?” His videos poke fun at the movement’s flaws and silly status markers, like being able to “mog” someone, which means you are the better looking person in a side-by-side comparison. (This is his fifth TikTok account after being reported by members of SkinnyTok for also calling out pro-eating disorder content.) “It’s so easy to rage-bait” looksmaxxers, he says. “I might post, ‘This is what I do to get my skin clear,’ then someone will comment ‘Oh, you can never get your skin clear because you’re a Black slur, slur, slur,” he says over FaceTime, repeating the word half a dozen times.
Looksmaxxing, which originated in online forums like 4chan a decade ago, suggests that a man’s success in life is directly tied to how good he looks. The purpose of the movement is to increase your overall “sexual market value,” and the more Eurocentric features you have, the higher you are on the “physical sexual looks” scale. On message boards, looksmaxxers use codes to rate other men on their journey. Young men refer to the process as “ascending,” where they work to attain a chiseled jawline, glass-smooth skin, and “hunter eyes” (almond-like contour, deep-set position, low set eyebrows). Those who have earned “Chad” status are considered among the most desirable of the pack. Many of the movement’s aims align with the wave of manosphere ideology that is reanimating American society under the Trump administration, where hypermasculinity has become both a performance and a weapon of oppression.
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