The Looksmaxxing Glossary: Every term you need to understand the internet's most unhinged subculture

Every so often, a word or phrase claws its way out of a cultural underground and into the mainstream lexicon. More often than not, it's African American Vernacular English (AAVE) that gets co-opted by TikTokkers before landing on Good Morning America, say. Slightly cringe, mostly harmless.

But some slang breaks containment in ways that aren't so benign.

Case in point: looksmaxxing. This term, which has recently been explained to viewers of NBC News, refers to the practice of maximizing your physical attractiveness — methodically, relentlessly, and by any means necessary. But it's no fashion-world portmanteau. The word actually hails from incel forums in the 2010s.

And it's not just looksmaxxing. Incel terminology that once festered in the dark corners of obscure boards has gone mainstream, while its proponents are viral. Influencers like Clavicular have amassed millions of views for unhinged takes involving the dangerous practice of bonesmashing. And unless you're in the know, you won't always know these terms when you see them.

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If you're scratching your head at tweets like this, or wondering what your kids or friends are suddenly all talking about, you're in the right place. Here's your field guide to the people, terms, and corners of the internet you never knew you needed to know.

Acension

The moment an incel successfully escapes their condition, crossing over from involuntary celibacy into an active romantic or sexual life.

Androgenic

An Australian looksmaxxing influencer locked in an ongoing battle with Clavicular and others for the title of #1 Chad — a term that broadly means a sexually successful male, but in looksmaxxing circles means winners of an online leaderboard.

ASU frat Leader

The influencer seen in a video that went viral on campus at Arizona State University. IRL, he's fitness influencer Varis Gilaj.

BIMAX

Short for bimaxillary osteotomy, BIMAX is a double-jaw surgery typically performed as a corrective procedure for conditions like an open bite. In medical contexts, it's reconstructive. In looksmaxxing circles, the procedure is sought out as an extreme cosmetic upgrade.

Blackpill

No, this isn't the red or blue pills of The Matrix. Blackpilling is a nihilistic offshoot of incel ideology and the manosphere, It refers to a bleak thesis: in the heterosexual dating market, physical attractiveness is the only thing that matters.

This worldview is propped up by pseudoscientific frameworks and cherry-picked data. It's the ideological bedrock from which practices like looksmaxxing grow. To "take the black pill" is to accept this as truth.

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Chad

Incel slang for physically attractive and sexually successful men. In incel culture, Chads represent the top 1% of men that women seek in the dating marketplace. Chads are often depicted in memes as a strong-jawed, blonde Übermensch.

Chadlite

A portmanteau of Chad (see above) and lite (to be lesser). Used to describe men who are above average in looks, but not to the level of a Chad.

Chud

A forgettable 1984 sci-fi horror film set in New York City, C.H.U.D. — which stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller — has found new relevance. It's a pejorative lobbed at incels and adjacent communities like the manosphere, comparing their communities to sewer creatures.

Clavicular

A Kick streamer, real name Braden Peters. His online username is a reference to the clavicle, which is very important in the looksmaxing community.

Mashable's Anna Iovine has an excellent piece on everything you'd need to know about the now-viral internet influencer.

Cortisol spike

Cortisol is a naturally produced steroid in the adrenal gland; it's better known as the stress hormone. In incel spaces, "cortisol spike" means getting visibly flustered or stressed out over something embarrassing.

Foid

This is shorthand for the incel term "Femoid." A portmanteau of female and humanoid, this is one of many pejorative terms incels use to refer to women.

Framemogged

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When your upper body simply overwhelms the competition. This refers to having wider shoulders, a bigger back, and a silhouette that makes the guy next to you look narrow by comparison.

Incel

Short for "involuntarily celibate," the incel community has its origins in a niche blog in the late 1990s. The Involuntary Celibacy Project began as a genuine support group for people struggling to find aromantic connections.

Over time, the male community grew more extreme, placing the blame for their struggles squarely on women. These groups migrated to 4chan and Reddit — first to r/incels, then to r/Braincels after the former was banned in 2017. In the 2020s, the ideology was associated with various terror attacks carried out by self-described incels.

Jestermaxxing

On the surface, this just means someone who leans hard into being the funny one. But in incel spaces, it's a pejorative aimed at men who use humor to get attention from women.

Kick

A Twitch alternative, backed by crypto casino Stake. Kick has carved out its niche through looser content moderation, with a lighter touch on copyrighted material, hate speech, and on-stream gambling.

That permissiveness has made it a natural home for several right-wing manosphere influencers, including Sneako, xQc, Aidan Ross, and Clavicular.

Limb Lengthening Surgery

A reconstructive procedure that gradually elongates the bones of the arms or legs, typically performed on patients with skeletal dysplasia or other genetic bone growth conditions. The process is lengthy, painful, and intensive — bones are surgically broken and then slowly separated over months, allowing new bone tissue to fill the gap.

Nevertheless, you guessed it, the surgery has gained traction online as a way to make oneself taller.

Looksmaxxing

We explained it up top, but what does Looksmaxxing look like in practice? On the tamer end, it's standard self-improvement: skincare routines, hitting the gym, and upgrading your wardrobe.

But the rabbit hole goes deep for some, particularly men of color, who face an added layer of racialized beauty standards within these spaces. Skin whitening treatments, anabolic steroid abuse, and increasingly extreme body modification have all found a home here. And then there's influencer Clavicular, who has become the poster child for bonesmashing.

Looksmax.org

One of many online forums for people in the looksmaxxing and incel community. According to a 2023 BBC investigation, the site was created by Lamarcus Small, a Black man living in Alabama. Small is also the creator of a sanctioned suicide forum that the BBC links to 50 deaths in the UK.

-maxxing

To understand looksmaxxing, you first need to understand the suffix it borrows from. "-Maxxing" means doing something with maximum, obsessive effort — and it traces back to min-maxing, a concept from tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. It refers to players putting all their points into high-value stats like strength while deliberately neglecting others — faith, intelligence, charisma.

Mewwing

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A pseudoscientific oral training technique that claims that proper tongue posture — pressed firmly against the roof of the mouth — can reshape your jaw structure over time. The science doesn't back it up, but that hasn't slowed the spread of this odd practice.

Mogging

To undermine another man by eclipsing him in physical appearance. The term is derived from the acronym AMOG, or "Alpha Male of the Group."

PSL Scale

A pseudoscientific attractiveness ranking system built by the looksmaxxing community to put an empirical number on your face. The acronym is an amalgamation of three defunct incel forums — PUAhate, SlutHate, and Lookism.

The scale runs from 0.25 to 8, though in practice, no one actually scores an 8. It measures facial features with an almost clinical specificity: eye shape, canthal tilt, nose angles, jaw size, and lip thickness. Proponents of the scale can be found on sites like Looksmax.org and on Reddit, in r/rateme and r/truerateme.

Sexual Market Value

An individual's measure of sexual attractiveness scored on a scale of 1 to 10. The formula shifts depending on gender. For women, SMV is almost entirely physical. For men, the calculus is broader: physique, income, career status, social clout, and personality can all push the number up or down.

Slaymaxxing

To have lots of sex.

Stacy

The female equivalent of a Chad. A Stacy is attractive, socially popular, and — crucially, to the incel mind — sexually active.

The term carries an implicit resentment: Stacy's represent everything incels want and, by their own logic, everything they'll never have access to.

Stake

An online crypto casino and parent company of Twitch-alternative Kick. Stake has become infamous for one of the laziest — and most effective — ad strategies on the internet: paying meme pages and content aggregators to slap its watermark onto viral images before reposting them.