Is Looksmaxxing Capitalist? By Jill Veerman

While Sexual Market Value (SMV) is an established part of the female habitus, the magnitude of modern aesthetic upkeep really became visible when boys started punching themselves in the face. This generation's real-life American Psycho, popular streamer Clavicular, has promoted “Bone-Smashing,” hitting your face with a hammer to improve your jawline, since his teens. And Clavicular isn't niche. Longevity influencer Bryan Johnson reportedly spends $2 million USD annually on his anti-aging routine. These extremes are normalised in online spaces where influencers promote “everything showers” and “morning peeling routines” using upwards of $2,500 USD worth of products. The online Zeitgeist is obsessed with being as young and attractive as possible, but what explains this generational Dorian Gray syndrome? 

In her pamphlet “Capitalism is Sexism,” Doortje Smithuijsen describes how the commodification of technology-driven capital, including influencers, escalates the role companies play in motivating your choices. In a hyperactive digital culture, algorithmic monetization capitalises on insecurities, framing beauty as a choice that you can buy into. This partly explains looksmaxxing, especially in a social climate where “pretty privilege” is institutionalised; where being conventionally attractive might grant you promotions, higher pay and even fewer criminal convictions. But it doesn't explain why it has gotten so out of hand. 

The Cut journalist Zoe Dubno links looksmaxxing trends to COVID-19. Her interpretation is simple: our struggle with an inescapable feeling of powerlessness shifts our attention to a thing we can control: our looks. Fittingly, the Aesthetic Plastic Surgery journal reported a 40% increase in US plastic surgery procedures from their pre-pandemic levels. Young people today are no longer shielded behind the illusion of the American Dream. We read and hear that AI is taking our jobs, talks of looming recessions and the dungeons of postgrad. Simultaneously we witness online everyday the lives of the ultra-rich, the oligarch’s Carhartt-clad offspring and Kylie Jenner’s girls’ trip to Cabo. Maybe we don’t stand a chance, but at least we can use their face cream. 

Online access to the lives of the plutocrats also suggests looksmaxxing may not merely be an outcome of a capitalist system, pushing you to believe you need retinol shots, but rather a product of its inequality. Looksmaxxing could be a symptom of the K-shaped economy, a state of imbalance where high-wealth citizens experience income growth while the rest endures strain. When resources pool with a small group of individuals, they invent new needs. Bryan Johnson spending 2 million yearly on longevity while a third of US citizens skip the doctor is stark. The body becomes a testimony for excess wealth, and upper class boredom translates into middle class envy. Here looksmaxxing turns into wealth signaling: attractiveness does not only become associated with success but also becomes a tool to attain it, as with middle class born figures like Clavicular. Within online algorithms, this matures into addiction, the line between the attainable and unattainable thinning. The role of social media is thus critical: rich people, the “winners” of capitalism, are not hidden behind gated community hedges and tinted Bentley windows anymore, they’re right on our phones and they know it.