Looksmaxxing: The Road Ahead

Recently, looksmaxxing has had a cultural moment. Personalities like Clavicular, known for running over a stream sniper, or ‘ASU Frat Leader’, known for his impressive bideltoid width, are enjoying great popularity. Before their popularity, terms like ‘incel’, ‘blackpill’, and ‘mogging’ were confined to obscure internet forums. Now they circulate freely on TikTok and Instagram, absorbed by millions of young men who may never visit a message board in their lives. The subculture has become the culture.

Industrialisation benefits all societies and there are reasons for all nations to industrialise. Despite that, industrialisation was uneven. It will be the same for this obsession with appearance. The antecedents are legible to anyone paying attention: dating apps that reduce human connection to a visual swipe, social media that makes appearance perpetually visible and comparable, an economy that measurably rewards attractiveness in hiring and earnings, and a beauty industry—now valued at over $670 billion globally^[1]—that profits from the insecurity all of this generates.

The material conditions required for this change are already present in the West and it's unreasonable to expect things will stop here. The cosmetic surgery market surpassed $59 billion in 2025.^[2] Peptides, hormone therapies, and limb-lengthening surgeries are no longer fringe. The incentive structures are in place.

South Korea

South Korea is the model for how things in the West will be. This obsession with appearance is at its most advanced there.

South Korea has the highest rate of cosmetic procedures per capita in the world: roughly 13.5 per 1,000 people.^[3] An estimated one in three women aged 19–29 has undergone some form of plastic surgery.^[4] Double eyelid surgery—blepharoplasty—is so commonplace it is considered a typical high school graduation gift.^[5] The Gangnam district of Seoul alone hosts between 400 and 500 clinics offering cosmetic procedures.^[6] South Korea's plastic surgery market was valued at $1.92 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at over 13% annually, reaching $6.63 billion by 2035.^[7]

But the numbers alone obscure the deeper reality: lookism in South Korea is structural. Employers routinely require job applicants to submit photographs with their résumés; some ask candidates to disclose their height and weight.^[8] One study found that 80% of job recruiters stated that physical appearance was an important factor in screening candidates.^[9] Over 92% of South Korean women reported expecting to face appearance-based discrimination during job interviews.^[10] A now-cancelled television programme, Let Me In, featured participants who had to convince a panel that their appearance had made life unmanageable. Parents were brought on to apologise for their children's looks. In such a society, can we call someone being obsessive over their looks completely delusional?

None of this happened overnight. The roots trace to gwansang,^[10] a centuries-old physiognomic tradition linking facial features to destiny, but the modern acceleration is a convergence of K-pop celebrity culture, a hypercompetitive job market, and the digital amplification of beauty standards through social media. Western looksmaxxing communities are now following the same trajectory. The question is not whether the West will arrive at something resembling South Korea's relationship to appearance. The question is how soon.

What Is to Be Done?

The future I described, though unfortunate, is unavoidable. Millions of young boys and girls will seek out risky surgeries and peptides to increase their beauty. While this is not exactly a zero-sum game, it largely is. When everyone optimises, the baseline shifts, and the pressure to conform intensifies rather than dissipates. The beautiful becomes the expected. The expected becomes the minimum.

It would be inappropriate to say that people affected by this trend are entirely delusional. They are responding to very real incentives. Research consistently demonstrates that people perceived as more attractive earn more, are hired more readily, and are treated with greater social favour. ‘Lookism’ is the last socially acceptable form of discrimination. Dismissing that reality helps no one. Neither does feeding it.

What Symmetrix hopes to accomplish is to avert the worst of this trend. Providing honest and accurate information—grounded in anatomical measurement rather than the loaded, imprecise language of ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’—is the best that can be done to deconstruct beauty and help orient people towards better things. We cannot reverse the cultural forces at play. We can, though, intervene at the point where those forces meet individual lives. We can provide clarity and precision, rather than shame and distortion. If more people can understand that beauty standards are neither fixed nor divine, more people can question them and remove the hold beauty standards have over their lives.