Looksmaxxing Ranked by Evidence: What Actually Works

What looksmaxxing means

Looksmaxxing is the internet’s word for deliberately optimizing your face and body, and it splits into 2 camps that get talked about as if they’re one thing. Softmaxxing is sleep, body fat, training, skincare and grooming: reversible, cheap, and backed by decades of human data. Hardmaxxing is surgery, hormones, fillers and anything that changes bone or biology on purpose: bigger effect, bigger bill, and in some cases a risk you carry for life.

I’ve written about the looksmaxxing debate on this site before, and about what the political pile-on gets wrong about the guys actually doing this. Neither piece ranked the individual interventions by evidence. This one does, with the harm stated before the benefit on anything you’d have to swallow, inject or cut for.

One line on Connor Murphy, since his name comes up in almost every conversation about this topic right now: his death deserves its own piece, and this site has one. What belongs here is the same standard applied to every intervention below: the psychological cost goes in the ledger next to the physical one.

The ranked list, graded by evidence

Grade A means a randomized trial in humans, or a combined review of several. Grade B is a large cohort or outcomes review without a placebo arm. Grade C is a case series or a mechanism paper: real biology, thin numbers. Grade D is forum lore with no clinical data behind it at all.

Intervention	Evidence grade	My status
Sleep, 7 to 9 hours	A	Doing it
Body fat, 10 to 15%	A	Doing it
Resistance training	A	Doing it
Tretinoin + daily sunscreen	A	Doing it
Minoxidil, topical or low-dose oral	B	Doing it
Finasteride / dutasteride	A for hair, B for the side effect signal	Would not
Hair transplant (FUE)	C	Would not
Teeth: whitening and alignment	B	Doing it
Mewing	D	Would not
Dermal fillers and Botox	B	Would not
Rhinoplasty / jaw surgery	B	Would not
Limb lengthening for height	B	Would not
Testosterone and anabolics	A	Done it
GH and GH secretagogues	B	Doing it, with limits
GHK-Cu	C	Doing it
Melanotan II	C	Would not

Sleep and body fat: the 2 everyone skips

Short sleep shows up on your face directly: cortisol rises, collagen production slows, and under-eye blood pooling gets worse within days, not months. Body fat percentage does more for jaw definition than any filler on this list, because what most people call a weak jawline is submental fat sitting over a normal skull. Take a man from 22% body fat to 12% and the jaw looks like a different jaw. It isn’t. The bone stayed exactly where it was. The fat is what changed.

Resistance training

Training adds size to the shoulders, traps and forearms, the frame that makes a face read as proportional in a photo. It also improves posture, which changes how the jaw and neck sit in a picture more than most people expect from lifting 3 to 4 days a week. None of it touches the face directly. All of it changes how the face gets judged.

Skincare: tretinoin and sunscreen

Tretinoin causes dryness, peeling and sun sensitivity in the first few weeks, worst in month 1, fading with continued use. A 2025 review of 8 randomized trials, 1,361 patients, ages 29 to 76, found topical tretinoin produced a significantly greater improvement in both fine and coarse wrinkles than the inactive vehicle, at concentrations from 0.025% up to 5% and follow-up from 16 weeks out to 2 years.

Sunscreen is the boring half nobody wants to hear about, and it’s the single highest-leverage move on this entire list: it prevents the UV damage tretinoin is busy repairing. Skip it and you’re running in place.

Hair: minoxidil, finasteride and dutasteride, and transplants

Minoxidil is a vasodilator that extends the growth phase of the hair follicle. A 2024 randomized trial of 65 androgenetic alopecia patients compared 5% topical solution against 1 mg daily oral minoxidil over 6 months. Both groups improved hair diameter significantly with no real gap between them, and over 60% of patients in each group reported satisfaction. Oral doses elsewhere run 0.25 mg to 5 mg a day, and the side effect doctors watch is heart rate, not blood pressure.

Finasteride and dutasteride block the enzyme that converts testosterone into DHT, the androgen that shrinks genetically sensitive follicles. That’s also the harm: DHT does real jobs in a young man’s body, and a 2025 pharmacovigilance analysis of 11,557 FDA adverse event reports tied to finasteride found erectile dysfunction and decreased libido as the most common signals, plus 2 the drug’s label doesn’t fully capture: Peyronie’s disease and what researchers now call post-5-alpha-reductase-inhibitor syndrome. Median time to onset was 61 days, most cases inside the first month, and a meaningful share of reports described symptoms still present past a year of use. Dutasteride blocks both isoforms instead of one and carries a longer half-life, so side effects, when they show up, clear slower once you stop.

This is why I would not run either one. I’d rather keep my DHT and lose some hair than run a systemic 5-alpha-reductase blocker for a cosmetic win. If you’re going to run it anyway, get a full hormone panel first so you have a baseline to compare against.

Hair transplants carry ordinary surgical risk: scarring, infection, a shock-loss period where existing hair falls out before the transplanted grafts take. The upside is mechanical, not biological. Follicles moved from the back of the scalp are resistant to DHT by genetics, so they keep growing regardless of what happens to the rest of the hairline. It works. I still rank it below minoxidil on personal risk, because it’s a permanent surgical answer to a problem 2 topical options solve for most men without a scalpel. See the hair regrowth stack and the minoxidil microneedling protocol on this site for the one I run.

Jaw, posture and mewing

Mewing has no clinical trial behind it, not one. The technique, holding your tongue against the roof of your mouth and your jaw in a specific resting posture, traces back to an orthodontist who was later stripped of his own dental license over the broader claims. In children, tongue posture and nasal breathing genuinely influence how the upper jaw develops. That’s real pediatric orthodontics. In an adult, the facial bones are fused. Posture changes muscle tone, not bone shape. If mewing is doing anything for you past age 20, it’s reducing tension in your jaw muscle and improving how you hold your neck in a photo, not remodeling your skull.

Teeth

Whitening and alignment, clear aligners or traditional braces, sit at grade B: decades of dental outcomes data, low complication rates, and a change that registers in every photo, since a smile is one of the first things people read in a face. Veneers go further. They’re permanent, they require grinding down healthy enamel, and every veneer eventually needs replacing, usually inside 10 to 15 years. I’d run whitening and alignment on almost anyone. I’d think twice about veneers on a 22-year-old with healthy teeth underneath.

Dermal fillers and Botox

Filler complications split into compression, volume pressing on a nearby vessel, and true vascular occlusion, filler entering the vessel itself. A 2019 review of 93 published vascular complication cases from 2004 to 2016 found blindness as the outcome in 61% of them, and of those, only 28% saw partial or full recovery. Hyaluronic acid and autologous fat were the fillers most often involved. Botox is mechanically safer, it paralyzes a muscle instead of adding volume near an artery, but it’s temporary, 3 to 4 months, which turns a one-time decision into a recurring bill.

Both mask a structural issue instead of fixing one, and filler specifically carries a low-probability, high-severity risk that most people booking a lunchtime cheek appointment have never had explained to them.

Rhinoplasty and jaw surgery

Both are real surgery under general anesthesia: infection, bleeding, and a revision rate of 5 to 15% depending on the surgeon and the case. Jaw surgery adds a period of wired or banded jaws and a recovery measured in months. Done well, both change a face more than anything else on this list, permanently, which is why the harm has to be weighed against a permanent result. I’d take this route for a real functional problem: a bite or airway that doesn’t work.

Height: limb lengthening

Cosmetic limb lengthening means breaking the femur or tibia and slowly distracting the bone with an internal nail or an external frame while new bone fills the gap. A 2020 systematic review of 795 patients across 11 studies found a mean end lengthening of 6.7 cm, with an average of 0.78 problems and 0.94 additional obstacles requiring extra treatment per patient, plus major complications at 0.15 per patient, most commonly deformation of the new bone and ankle or subtalar joint stiffness. The procedure works. Patients gained real height and reported real satisfaction, and no deaths were reported. But you’re signing up for months on crutches, sometimes a second surgery, and a complication rate that climbs with every extra centimeter past the standard range. This is the one on the list I’d call genuinely reckless for a purely cosmetic reason. I would not do it.

Testosterone and anabolics

Exogenous testosterone shuts down your own production through the HPG axis, and depending on compound and dose you’re looking at elevated hematocrit, shifts in lipids, and in some men real mood changes that need bloodwork, not guesswork, to track. That’s the cost, and I’ve paid it. Hematocrit management has been part of my own protocol for years.

The upside is the best-documented body composition effect on this list. A combined analysis of 32 observational studies covering 4,513 men found testosterone supplementation cut body weight by an average of 3.5 kg and waist circumference by 6.2 cm at 24 months, alongside a consistent reduction in fat mass and increase in lean mass, plus improvements in fasting glucose, insulin resistance and lipid profile. That’s shoulders, traps, and a jaw shadow from a lower body fat percentage on a bigger frame, the face itself was never touched. For the fertility and estrogen side of running it, see enclomiphene versus clomid and HCG with TRT on this site.

GH and IGF-1

Growth hormone and IGF-1 in an adult with closed growth plates cannot make you taller. The plates are fused, full stop. What exogenous GH can do in an adult running it too high for too long is push toward acromegaly: thickening of the brow, jaw and hands, joint pain, and insulin resistance. A 2007 systematic review pooled 18 trials, 220 people, in healthy older adults averaging 69, at a dose around 14 micrograms per kilogram a day for about half a year. Fat mass dropped 2.1 kg, lean mass rose 2.1 kg, total weight didn’t change. The cost: significantly higher rates of soft tissue swelling, joint pain, carpal tunnel syndrome and breast tissue growth in men, plus more new diabetes than the untreated group. The authors’ own conclusion: GH cannot be recommended as an anti-aging therapy on that evidence. The population studied was older than the typical 20-something biohacker, but the mechanism doesn’t change with age: IGF-1 pushed high enough for long enough is an acromegaly risk in anyone.

I run GH secretagogues, not exogenous GH itself, because they work with the body’s own pulsatile release instead of overriding it, and I test IGF-1 on a schedule instead of guessing. More in the hexarelin review, and the broader category on the peptides hub.

Skin peptides: GHK-Cu and melanotan II

GHK-Cu is a copper-binding tripeptide your body already makes, and its natural levels fall with age, the mechanistic case for topical or injectable replacement. The human trial data is thinner than the mechanism story: mostly small studies on collagen and wound-healing markers, not large independent trials on visible skin outcomes. I run it topically. I wouldn’t call the evidence strong. I’d call it a real biological rationale that hasn’t been tested at the scale the claims deserve.

Melanotan II activates the same melanocortin receptor pathway that drives melanocyte growth, which is exactly why it tans you without sun exposure and exactly why it’s the one compound on this list I’d never touch. A published case report describes a 20-year-old woman, Fitzpatrick skin type II, who developed a confirmed cutaneous melanoma 3 months after a 3 to 4 week course of self-injected melanotan II combined with sunbed tanning. Causality isn’t settled, most reports involve heavy UV exposure layered on top of the drug, but stimulating the exact receptor pathway that keeps melanoma cells alive isn’t a bet I’m willing to make for a tan. If what you actually want is the libido effect people confuse with tanning, PT-141 works on a related receptor for that specific job, without the tanning or the melanoma signal attached to it.

What I’d tell a 22-year-old

If you’re 22 and asking where to start, here’s the order I’d run it in. Fix body fat and sleep first. They’re free, and they change your face more than most people expect. Then hair: minoxidil before finasteride, because one has a side effect list you can read in a weekend and the other comes with a 61-day median onset warning attached to it. Then skin: tretinoin and sunscreen, cheap, boring, and it works. Everything past that, fillers, surgery, hormones, height, GH, is a bigger decision than a forum thread should be making for you. Every one of them belongs on a spreadsheet, backed by real numbers.

FAQ

What does looksmaxxing mean?
Looksmaxxing is deliberately optimizing your face and body, split into softmaxxing, sleep, body fat, training and skincare, all reversible, and hardmaxxing, surgery, hormones and injectables, which carry permanent or systemic risk.

What’s the difference between hardmaxxing and softmaxxing?
Softmaxxing changes are reversible and low risk: better sleep, lower body fat, resistance training, tretinoin. Hardmaxxing changes involve surgery, hormones or injectables, and carry real, sometimes permanent risk alongside a bigger visible result.

Is looksmaxxing dangerous?
Parts of it are. Sleep and body fat carry no real risk. Finasteride, fillers, limb lengthening and melanotan II each carry documented risks, from persistent sexual side effects to vascular occlusion to a melanoma signal, and each deserves research before you start, not after.

What’s the best looksmaxxing move to start with?
Body fat percentage and sleep. They change jaw definition and skin quality more than most of the hardmaxxing side, with no downside.

Does mewing work?
No clinical trial has tested mewing directly, and no evidence supports jaw remodeling in adults, whose facial bones are already fused. It may improve muscle tone and posture. It does not reshape bone.