The online movement markets itself to boys in puberty, when their faces are changing on their own, and tells them to keep changing them.
Members trade in before-and-after photos, cosmetic surgery tips, jaw exercises and makeup. The before is who you are, and the after is who you have to become.
Clavicular is one of looksmaxxing’s most-followed influencers. The 20-year-old, whose real name is Braden Peters, walked off a 60 Minutes Australia set this month after reporter Adam Hegarty asked if he is an incel.
Peters said it was the worst sequence of questions he had ever heard. He left the set, and the camera kept rolling.
Chance Turner, a 20-year-old server in Oakville, is one of the young Canadian men watching that content. He was 16 when he saw Clavicular on Instagram. He was overweight, had no confidence and felt invisible to girls. The reels caught his eye, and he started looksmaxxing.
“Life is so much better when you are an attractive person,” Turner said.
Looksmaxxing is part of the manosphere. That is the umbrella term for the online world of incels, red-pill influencers and self-improvement communities aimed at young men.
Young men are being told they are not man enough. The manosphere offers them a target. It tells them women are to blame, and that the impossible standards they see online are the bar they have to clear.
Turner says that the bar decides who gets heard.
“If I were to come up to you, some ugly guy just sitting there saying, 'hey, I’m upset,' you’re not gonna listen to me,” Turner said. “But if an attractive person comes up telling you that, you’re gonna listen.”
Health Minister Marjorie Michel launched on Feb. 23 a national consultation to build Canada’s first Men and Boys’ Health Strategy. The federal announcement names harmful online spaces, including the manosphere, as a rising risk to boys’ and men’s health. The consultation closes June 1.
A 2025 Dalhousie University study, published in Sociology of Health and Illness, analyzed more than 8,000 comments on a looksmaxxing forum that draws six million visitors a month.
Sociology professor Michael Halpin, the lead author, found the community encourages bone-smashing, where users hit their faces with blunt objects, and tells members their faces are wrong. Many end up feeling like failed men, and some are encouraged to self-harm.
Turner remembers the kid he was before any of it.
“I was a fat kid in high school,” Turner said. “Wasn’t able to talk to anybody and wasn’t confident at all.”
Jordan Foster of MacEwan University and Jillian Sunderland of the University of Toronto argued in The Conversation in March that looksmaxxing fills a vacuum. Stable work, home ownership and long-term partnerships feel out of reach for many young men.
The manosphere offers an answer that is easier than the truth. The truth is that wages, housing and isolation are the problem. The lie is that women are.
The federal consultation asks Canadians to fill out an online survey, but the Clavicular videos are open 24 hours a day.
A 16-year-old in Oakville is not choosing between the two. He does not know the consultation exists.
Looksmaxxing is harmful and redundant. Your face is not the most important thing about you.
Telling young men it is, and that women are to blame for the rest, is how the manosphere has built itself a six-million-visitor-a-month audience.
Canada finally has a men’s health strategy coming. The manosphere already has one, and it is running all day.
The consultation closes. The forums do not close.
