The male beauty boom has a dark subtext. Founders need to read it.
- Paula Ironside
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Looksmaxxing looks like a grooming trend. It isn't. It's the male version of something the beauty industry has always done, and that makes it both more familiar and more urgent than most founders realise.
You've seen this before
"Why does the male version require a briefing when the female version has been running for a century?"
Good question. The beauty industry was built, explicitly, deliberately, on insecurity. "Making women feel as if they're not good enough is central to the sale of all those two- and three-figure backlit skin creams," Pacific Standard wrote, in a line that most of us in this industry recognise without needing a citation. Fear-based marketing aimed at women began in the 1950s. By 2021, it had reached high-school influencers promoting rejuvenating serums. One 10-year-old girl explained her use of wrinkle cream: "I just don't like the look of wrinkles. And that's probably because society has conditioned me not to."
So yes. Looksmaxxing is the male version of what the beauty industry has always done. That's not a reason to dismiss it. That's a reason to take it seriously, because we already know exactly how this ends
The pattern, in both directions
Industry creates or amplifies a standard → men or women internalise it as a deficiency → spending increases → psychological harm compounds → the industry either ignores the harm (sustaining short-term revenue) or builds differently (sustaining long-term equity). Women's beauty took seventy years to partially reckon with this. Men's beauty is at year three.
The question isn't whether you're participating in this dynamic. You are. The question is which part of the cycle you want to build from.
What looksmaxxing actually is, briefly
Looksmaxxing originated in incel forums, not wellness culture. The ideological framework is the manosphere's concept of Sexual Market Value, the idea that a man's attractiveness is a measurable score that determines his social fate, and that relentless physical optimisation is the only route to "ascending." Researchers describe these communities as a gateway: mainstream fitness content → optimisation content → pseudoscientific "alpha" ideology → conspiratorial and misogynistic material. Social media algorithms accelerate that path without the user consciously choosing it.
Softmaxxing (skincare, grooming, diet) bleeds directly into hardmaxxing (surgery, fillers, steroid cycles, facial restructuring). By the time TikTok banned looksmaxxing content in April 2025, daily searches had already surged from 300,000 to 1.9 million in a single month. The ban followed the culture. It didn't prevent it.
The line between self-improvement and self-harm has officially blurred. That line sits exactly where your product lives.
Body dysmorphic disorder and muscle dysmorphia in adolescent boys and young men are now documented at scale. The same psychological ecosystem producing the spending is producing the harm. These are not two separate market dynamics. They are one.
Three ways brands get this wrong
01 Optimisation language that feeds the anxiety loop
"Level up," "glow up," "upgrade your face", this is the looksmaxxing register. It is also the register of every before/after ad women's beauty has run for decades. It works, briefly. It also builds a customer who is perpetually dissatisfied, which is either a business model or a liability depending on where regulation and culture move next. In men's beauty, it is also aligning your brand, whether you intend it or not, with an ideology that frames male worth as a biological score.
02 Chasing engagement without reading the ecosystem
Certain creators, slang terms, and hashtags in this space carry ideological lineages that are invisible to teams without cultural context. "Mog," "looksmaxx," "Chad," and "mew" are not neutral terms. Aligning with creators in this space without understanding their manosphere affiliations is how brands end up implicitly endorsing misogynistic or extremist ideology. This is not a theoretical risk. It has happened to multiple brands in adjacent spaces.
03 "We just sell moisturiser"
The same argument has been made by every beauty brand that has ever sold an anti-ageing serum to a 22-year-old. Product neutrality is not brand neutrality. The context in which a product is sold, the language used to sell it, and the ecosystem of creators who carry it, these are brand decisions, whether they are made consciously or by default.
What the counter-position actually looks like, in practice
This is the section that was missing from the first version of this piece. "Build on belonging, not anxiety" is a principle. Here is what it looks like as creative strategy.
Sell the ritual, not the result
WHAT WORKS
Humanrace (Pharrell Williams, launched 2020) built its entire identity around wellness as a daily ritual, not transformation, not before/after, not optimisation. The brand's stated mission is "revolutionising being well." Its three-step routine is positioned as a practice, not a fix. It explicitly refuses to differentiate by gender. The framing is: this is what you do, not who you are supposed to become. The brief: What does your product feel like to use? That's your campaign.
Humour as culture, not distraction
WHAT WORKS
Dr. Squatch built a $400M revenue brand, acquired by Unilever for an estimated $2.5–3 billion in 2025, almost entirely on absurdist humour, pop culture, and the premise that natural grooming is just something men do now. Its marketing is conspicuously free of optimisation language. There is no "become a better man." There is soap, a joke, and a feeling of belonging to a culture of men who take care of themselves without making it a referendum on their worth. That positioning proved durable enough to attract one of the world's largest FMCG acquirers. The brief: What would your brand look like if anxiety were completely off the table?
Identity first, product second
WHAT WORKS
The brands that will have long-term equity with young men are those that understand what the looksmaxxing movement is actually selling, not products, but identity and belonging. Young men drawn to that ecosystem are not primarily seeking better skin. They are seeking recognition, community, and a framework for understanding who they are. The brands that offer that, through creative culture, friendship, craft, and a masculinity that does not depend on hierarchy, are building something the anxiety-merchants cannot replicate once the cultural tide shifts.
The brief: Who does a man become when he uses your brand? Not looks-wise. Identity-wise.
Know your ecosystem before you enter it
DUE DILIGENCE
Before any campaign targeting young men: audit your creators for manosphere affiliations. Check what communities share your adjacent hashtags. Understand what language in your brief has looksmaxxing resonance. This is not a values exercise. It is the same category of brand risk management as checking whether a licensing partner has outstanding litigation. The brief: Would a cultural intelligence audit of your current campaign give you a clean result?
Before your next campaign brief goes out, ask these four questions
Does our messaging assume our customer is currently deficient? If yes, that's the anxiety loop. Where does it go instead?
Do we know what ideological ecosystem our target creators operate in? Not their follower count, their cultural affiliations.
What does our brand offer beyond the product outcome? Belonging, identity, community, humour, what is the thing a customer gets that isn't in the formula?
In ten years, when we look back at how male beauty built itself, which side of this moment do we want to have been on?
Hi I'm Paula, founder of H&F, and I work with wellness and beauty founders in a creative partnership that sits somewhere between strategy, storytelling, and art direction. It’s not consulting in the traditional sense, and it’s not built for speed. It’s for founders who are thinking in years, not launches, and who care as much about coherence as they do about growth.
If this way of building resonates, you can learn more about how I work here.
And if you’d rather stay in the conversation, Hunter & Florence is where these ideas continue, through monthly founder conversations and reflections on building brands that refuse to be forgettable. Subscribe to stay up to date.
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