We’ve traced how the -maxxing suffix escaped incel forums and how the PSL scale came dressed as science. A 2025 study puts a name and a mechanism to the whole process — and argues the rebrand isn’t an accident of language. It’s a strategy that works.

What the researchers did

The study, by Anda Solea and Professor Lisa Sugiura at the University of Portsmouth, was published on November 17, 2025 in the journal Crime, Media, Culture. It’s not an op-ed; it’s 25 months of tracked content — looksmax.org forum posts, Incels.Wiki pages, and 23 TikTok accounts across 332 videos, plus hashtag and view metrics.

In other words: they followed the material from the forums where it originates to the mainstream platform where it lands, and watched what changed in transit.

The finding: rename it, and it gets through

Their core argument is that incel communities rebrand harmful content using “looksmaxxing” language to evade platform moderation. Call it what it is — incel ideology — and a platform’s trust-and-safety system flags it. Call it “looksmaxxing,” “glow-up,” “self-improvement,” or reframe “incel” as “sub5” (below 5 on the PSL scale), and the same worldview walks straight through the filter as wellness content.

Solea and Sugiura give the phenomenon a name — “Digital Subcultural Diffusion Theory” — describing how extreme ideologies migrate from niche forums to mainstream feeds by shedding the vocabulary that would get them blocked. As Dr. Solea put it, the rebrand “made the association with the incel ideology more accessible.”

And it reaches enormous audiences. The researchers found hashtags like #looksmaxxing and #pslgods have accumulated billions of TikTok views, some individual tags reaching hundreds of millions. This is not a fringe. It’s a pipeline with a mass-market on-ramp, and — in Solea’s words — “younger and vulnerable users are particularly susceptible.”

Why this reframes everything else we’ve covered

This study is the connective tissue under the whole series. Each maxxing claim we’ve checked isn’t a free-floating beauty tip — it’s a node in a system that the Portsmouth work shows was engineered to be palatable:

  • The bonesmashing and DIY content isn’t random danger; it’s the “hardmaxxing” end of a spectrum whose soft end (skincare, mewing) is the friendly face that gets you in the door.
  • The Dalhousie “when help is harm” study showed what’s inside the community; this Portsmouth study shows how it recruits — by not looking like what it is.
  • The reason a debunk video feels insufficient is that you’re not arguing with a skincare trend. You’re arguing with a re-skinned ideology that chose the skin specifically because it’s hard to argue with.

Where we land

The practical takeaway is a kind of media literacy. When a “self-improvement” feed starts sorting people into tiers, treating “sub5” as an identity, or sliding from grooming tips toward talk of genetic hierarchy and who deserves what — that’s not looksmaxxing drifting into darkness by accident. Per the research, that is the product, wearing the vocabulary that got it past the bouncer.

Knowing the rename is the strategy is the defense. “Looksmaxxing,” “glow-up,” “sub5” — these are, in part, words chosen so a moderation system (and a parent, and you) wouldn’t recognise what you were reading. Recognising it anyway is the one optimization the algorithm can’t sell you.