How masculinity is being redefined in India in the age of looksmaxxing

IF YOU JUST KEEP YOUR TONGUE IN CONTACT with your upper palate, if you form that habit, it’s a better posture for your face,” says Sanchit Kalra, with the kind of seriousness a personal trainer might employ as he corrects your posture in the gym. As though sensing my confusion, he com­pares what he has been explaining with the com­mon advice against slouching. “When you roll back your shoulders and keep your chest up, it’s not changing anything biological in you. It’s just a better posture,” he says. “Mewing is the same—a better posture for your face.”

Kalra, who is based in Delhi, is part of an inter­net subculture, consisting mostly of young men, known as looksmaxxing that has exploded in popularity over the last one year. And here, he is explaining the concept of mewing, the looks­maxxing term for pushing out your jaw to make the lower half of your face appear more defined and attractive.

Looksmaxxing is believed to have emerged as an offshoot of what is termed as the manosphere, the loosely connected network of online commu­nities and influencers whose regressive views have spread alarm in recent times. But while the manosphere and its incels (involuntary celibates) claim that dating dynamics are unfairly rigged against them, looksmaxxers pursue attractiveness to the exception of every­thing else. The purpose of looksmaxxers is to “ascend”, their term for becoming more handsome, and for this they will do anything, from “softmaxxing”, where people try to improve their looks by eating better, exercising, and perfecting a skin-care regimen, to “hardmaxxing”, where people undergo more questionable inter­ventions like taking steroids, experimental drugs, and even going under the knife. And then there is also the ridiculous, like repeat­edly striking your facial bones with objects (bone-smashing) in the belief that this will create micro-fractures that will heal into a more defined and chiselled bone structure. The community has its own ecosystem of websites and platforms, its own argot and belief systems, and in recent years, it has begun to attract a large crowd of young males.

This subculture is now gradually growing in India too. Young Indian men and teens are posting questions on popular looks­maxxing platforms, submitting their photos to be rated, talking about their experiments with various looksmaxxing techniques, and influencers and content creators such as Kalra are emerging.

Kalra, who runs a popular YouTube channel on self-improve­ment for men (BeYourBest), apart from running his own clothing brand, began working on his appearance a few years ago when he was in college. He began exercising and losing weight, perfected his own skin-care regimen, and started dressing better. “I just wanted to change the way I looked for the sole reason of getting girls, that’s it,” he says. But as he began to improve his appearance and become more involved in the looksmaxxing scene, he says, he found that the benefits of looking better run much deeper than merely being attractive to women. It makes an individual value oneself more, he says, and bestows more self-confidence. “Social perception is also a huge plus point. We all know about pretty privilege, right,” Kalra says, referring to the notion that conven­tionally attractive women receive more privileges. “It’s the same with guys too. I’ve noticed that in real life, and not just from the opposite gender but also from men, if you look good, getting work done becomes easier.”

Looksmaxxing may have a distinctive ethos and might be limited to a very particular set of followers, but in its relentless pursuit of male beauty, it touches on a trend that is taking place across the country today. Men are unabashedly pursuing beauty like never before. They are sharing their skincare regimens on­line; market shelves are crammed with grooming products tar­geted towards men; there is the rise of a new type of influencer, the men’s beauty influencer; and many men are also increas­ingly going under the knife.

“Everybody today has to be presentable all the time,” says Rahul Shah as he explains what he sees as a shift in attitude that is animating men’s interest in looking good. “Today, people are in front of a camera all the time. They have selfies to send, reels to make, parties and social events to attend. Everyone has to look good.”

Shah knows a thing or two about this trend. As the founder of a men’s makeup brand, Yaan Man, he has seen this transformation taking place up close. A pharmacognosist by education who had worked in the cosmetics industry in the US before returning to India, where he began developing cosmetic products for other firms, Shah noticed a gap in the market for cosmetics that could be targeted towards men. He wasn’t however certain if this would work, and he began by launching only a concealer, along with a face wash and a moisturiser. “I thought men might hesitate to use a concealer, but selling the face wash and moisturiser shouldn’t be a problem. But, interestingly, men were more interested in the concealer,” he says. “They were also asking for more products like the concealer to deal with things like hyperpigmentation. Essentially, they were asking for makeup indirectly.”

Today, Yaan Man sells a whole gamut of makeup products for men, from primers, foundation creams, concealers and beauty balm (BB) creams to tinted lip balms, hydrating set sprays, and more. It has also stopped referring to itself as a skincare brand, and begun to call itself a men’s makeup brand. “We just stopped trying to beat around the bush. How were we going to make men wear makeup if we ourselves were cagey about it?” Sales have now begun to shoot rapidly through the roof. After it was featured on the popular TV show Shark Tank, where it got investments from two of the judges, the firm’s revenue rose, according to Shah, five times over. The market, Shah believes, is on the cusp of even more growth in the next few years.

Men’s makeup represents a small but growing category within the larger men’s grooming market that is also getting bigger rap­idly today. This used to be a limited category, dominated mostly by shaving essentials, hair oils and deodorants, which were largely positioned around personal hygiene. This has however changed now. India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), a trust established by the Department of Commerce under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, estimates that the men’s grooming market was valued at $2.3 billion in 2024. This is expected to reach $4.3 billion by 2033.

A big factor that is both a byproduct and a contributor to this growth is the thriving ecosystem of social media influencers. One only needs to tap a few links on Instagram to land upon a vast digital world about male skincare and grooming, where men share their skincare and beauty routines, display the kind of fa­miliarity with beauty products unknown to men even a decade ago, and where many turn to influencers, some of whom have follower counts in the millions, to ask for tips and reviews. “If I have to guess, out of 100 young men, I will say 95 follow a proper skincare routine. They know what they are talking about and they are interested in this topic,” says Sachin Parmar, a 22-year-old Ahmedabad-based skincare influencer who has a large following among Gujarati speakers.

Parmar began making content around skincare a little over three years ago. He used to suffer from sensitive and oily skin and kept experimenting with products and consulting dermatolo­gists. When he started uploading videos on these experiments, he says, initially many men would mock him. “In the last two years, this attitude has changed completely. Skincare is on the top of everybody’s mind now,” he says.

MEN AREN’T JUST reaching for the latest cosmetics on market shelves. The pursuit of a beauty ideal is now increasingly taking men to wellness clinics and plastic surgeons, where they are undergoing a variety of invasive and non-invasive procedures to look better.

Neil, a 40-year-old finance professional from Mumbai’s Vasai region whose name has been changed upon request, underwent a rhinoplasty to get a sharper nose two years ago. “My nose used to be bulky and I used to be very conscious of it all my life. After the procedure, the look of my entire face changed. The work was done only on the nose, but the whole face started looking more angular and sharp,” he says. Two years since the procedure, he has begun to feel that the nose has lost some of its sharpness, and he is now saving money for a buccal fat removal procedure, where the fat pads in the lower cheeks are removed surgically to give the face a slimmer look. “As a man, it might sound like I’m being too invested in how I look, but it is something that I feel is important to me,” he says.

Dr Vaibhav Shah, a plastic surgeon who specialises in facial and hair procedures and who performed Neil’s rhinoplasty, points out that men today constitute a large chunk of patients undergoing cosmetic procedures. His own practice has grown from men making up about 15 per cent of his patients, mostly getting hair transplants, 10 years ago, to about 50 per cent today. These male patients come asking for a range of procedures, from hair and beard transplants, rhinoplasty and getting the contours of faces reshaped by removing fat from the cheeks to asking for derma fillers for more prominent jawlines and cheekbones. “What is impressive is some are so well-versed with the subject, they will have used AI tools to make simulations of what their faces will look like after the desired procedures,” he says.

Dr Shah tends to get several aspiring actors, which is not sur­prising given he practices in Mumbai. But increasingly, he says, he gets influencers who believe a little work on their faces will propel their careers forward. “You get all sorts, from people who want to become motivational speakers to those who want to make content around stock markets and investment banking. And they feel that looking more presentable will be a big help,” he says.

A few years ago, he had a patient who was a dancer in a popular dancing troupe in Mumbai. The head of the troupe always kept this individual behind the front row because, the individual felt, he had an unattractive and blunt nose. “He was very happy with the procedure. And when we met sometime later, he told me that not only had he made it to the front row, he had even got to perform on a popular reality TV show,” Dr Shah says.

MEN IN THE film and television industry, and even social media influencers, may have a bigger incentive to secretly tinker with their noses and jaws, and get eyebrows lifted and faces tightened, but increasingly now, even individuals outside the orbit of these glamourous careers, where career advancements have little to do with how handsome they appear, are going under the knife. Shankar (name changed upon request), a 31-year-old who works in a government office in Mum­bai, last year spent over `1 lakh to gift himself a slimmer face with a more defined jawline. “It was something that always bothered me,” he says, referring to what he perceives are cheeks that are too round and plump, and a jaw that isn’t angular enough. So last year, after having looked up the types of surgeries he could undergo and then consulting Dr Shah, Shankar had the size of his cheeks surgi­cally reduced by undergoing a buccal fat removal procedure, and then had botox and dermal fillers injected into the masseter—the thick, rectangular muscle that connects our cheekbones to the lower jaw—to give his lower face a highly contoured and sculpted look. “I was a bit worried because it was a surgical procedure after all. But it went by easily,” Shankar says. “I keep getting compli­ments on my looks now. But nobody can actually tell that I went to a plastic surgeon for it.”

While cosmetic procedures purely for aesthetic reasons haven’t been as popular as they are today among men, there used to be a few who did undergo surgeries to remove enlarged male breasts (gynecomastia). The number of these surgeries, Dr Leena Jain, a consultant plastic and reconstructive microsur­geon in Mumbai’s SL Raheja hospital, points out, has increased many times over. The rampant use of steroids by men working out in gyms has also led to a hormonal imbalance, she says, that is contributing to this increase in gynecomastia cases. Another pro­cedure that she frequently performs on men is liposuction, where the patients, usually active gym-going men who have failed to lose what is colloquially referred to as stubborn fat in some pockets of the body, seek her help. In some cases, she helps gym-goers who may have built enviable physiques but who have been unable to develop the six or eight-pack-abs they crave for. “Here, it is not weight loss but a high-definition body contouring that they are after. By removing the fat tissue that lies beneath the skin, you can make [six or eight] pack abs more visible,” she says.

Dr Rachana Tataria, a consultant in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Fortis Hospital in Mumbai’s Mulund area, often gets patients—both men and women—who will turn up just a few weeks before their marriage looking to lose some fat through liposuction. “They will show up just two to three weeks before their wedding asking for some arm liposuction or thigh liposuc­tion. But we don’t recommend this. You have to give at least three months, and ideally six months, for your tissues to settle down and the swelling to come down after the procedure,” Dr Tataria says. A liposuction procedure that she did perform a few months ago was on a 38-year-old man who despite working out in a gym and having lost weight overall was unable to get rid of that slight layer of fat colloquially known as love handles that often crops up at our waists during middle age. A little more of a push in the gym could have probably helped him lose that fat but he instead, like many others now, chose to get it extracted through liposuction. “He was the right candidate for the procedure actually,” Dr Tataria says. “Liposuction doesn’t work as a weight loss solution. It’s for people who in spite of having a healthy lifestyle and a good BMI are unable to get rid of certain pockets of fat,” she says. “He was really happy with how the procedure turned out.”

Elsewhere in Mumbai, Manish Mayurva, a looksmaxxer who goes by the name Vikram Aditya online, is running me through the various drugs and medicines he takes to maintain his appearance. He lists these in rapid bursts—Bimatoprost 0.03 per cent (a serum originally meant for glaucoma but which looksmaxxers also use to make their eyelashes grow longer and thicker); Tazarotene 0.05 per cent, a retenoid for skincare; an injectable peptide to enhance fat loss—until it becomes difficult to keep up. And then he begins to tell me about his future plans, using precise anatomical terms that one would expect only doctors would be familiar with.

“My infraorbital, the part below my eyes, is a bit weak. I will get an implant done in the infraorbital-maxilla bone [to augment the bone structure there]. Then, I plan to get fillers done for my lips which are a bit thin,” he says.

Mayurva, who has transformed his appearance over the last few years by following the tenets of looksmaxxing, today makes content around the phenomenon. Many of these are tips on how to improve one’s appearance but very often he will post videos meant to “rage-bait” viewers.

To Mayurva, any step taken to increase one’s beauty is vir­tuous. When people say looks don’t matter, he believes many of them are simply being hypocritical or delusional. “Normies [slang, often used disparagingly, for people with mainstream tastes] will write ‘Looks don’t matter’. But, elsewhere, you will find those same guys saying things that show just how much they look at the world through a person’s appearance,” he says.

It may be tempting to poke fun at this growing trend of men obsessing about their looks. But we do live in a world that is hyper-visual and looks-obsessed, and where social media algorithms constantly reward physical perfection and fuel appearance anxi­ety. And in many ways, women have been looksmaxxing—and have been expected to looksmaxx—long before some young men coined a term for it. Could it be that looksmaxxing isn’t really the ridiculous phenomenon it is often made out to be, but a reflec­tion of a world constantly enforcing the idea that looks, male or female, increasingly correlates with worth? Kalra would agree. To him, you cannot afford to not look good any more. “You go out with your friends, and one of those friends takes a photo of the whole group and posts it as a story on Instagram. And you stick out badly. Now everyone has seen it. Your crush too,” he says. “You have to be at your best. Always.”