This piece discusses self-harm and suicide. Resources are at the end.

Most looksmaxxing coverage is anecdotal — a shocked reporter describing bonesmashing, an expert saying “please don’t.” A 2025 study did something more rigorous and more damning: it sat down and read the forum. The finding, in the title, is the thesis: “When Help Is Harm.”

What they actually did

The study — led by Michael Halpin and Meghan Gosse at Dalhousie University, with co-authors at UBC and the University of Victoria, published in Sociology of Health & Illness in March 2025 — analysed 8,072 comments from a looksmaxxing website that receives six million unique visitors a month. They looked at two boards: a self-improvement forum (5,327 comments) and a ratings board where users post their own photos for scoring (2,745 comments). The data was collected in 2023.

This isn’t a hot take. It’s a systematic read of what the community actually says to its own members, at scale.

What they found

The researchers group the harm into three mechanisms, and each one maps onto trends we’ve covered here — now with the receipts.

1. A brutal way of seeing. Users apply a rating lens so punishing it renders most men, in the study’s word, “subhuman.” A representative teardown: “he has no mandible,” scores of 1 out of 10. This is the PSL scale in the wild — a caste system that grades ordinary faces as failures.

2. Self-harm dressed as medicine. The community actively encourages dangerous interventions: bonesmashing and bone-breaking leg-lengthening surgery among them. The exact practices we rate risky and irreversible, the forum frames as self-improvement protocols.

3. Demoralisation, and worse. This is the part that moves it from “toxic” to “emergency.” The study documents users explicitly encouraging suicide — telling others to “rope” (hang themselves) or worse. One user wrote that the forum had them “on the verge of roping.” A space marketed as helping men look better was, in writing, telling some of them to die.

The paper also notes the harm radiates outward: the boards traffic in open misogyny and racist caricatures, positioning women as hostile judges and reducing whole groups to slurs.

Why this is the story under all the other stories

We fact-check individual maxxing claims because accuracy matters. This study is the reminder of why it matters so much here specifically. When we say mewing won’t reshape your jaw or bonesmashing is dangerous, the stakes aren’t just a wasted purchase. The environment making those promises is, by peer-reviewed account, one that tells six million monthly visitors their faces are wrong and, at its darkest, that they shouldn’t exist.

“When help is harm” is the cleanest four-word summary of the entire problem anyone has produced. The community’s whole self-image is support — bros helping bros optimise. The data says the support is the delivery mechanism for the damage.

If this is you

If a forum, an app, or a rating has you feeling like your face — or your life — is a failing grade, that feeling is coming from a machine researchers have now formally described as harmful. It is not an objective read on your worth.

  • US: call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline)
  • UK & ROI: Samaritans, 116 123
  • Elsewhere: find a local line at findahelpline.com
  • For men’s mental health specifically: HeadsUpGuys

The most useful thing to know about the looksmaxxing community, per the people who read 8,000 of its posts, is that it is not on your side. Closing the tab is a legitimate glow-up.