At 14 years old, Braden Peters was ready to ascend. He was fed up with his round face, acne breakouts and shrimpy build and simply waiting for puberty was not going to cut it. When the pandemic rolled around, his opportunity for action struck.
“I was taking testosterone. I would mix in random orals [anabolic steroids] every once in a while. And I started blowing up quickly because I was in a massive caloric surplus,” says Peters, reflecting on his quest for beauty in a YouTube video. The influencer, better known as Clavicular, is now 20 years old and preaching looksmaxxing to thousands of young men with all the impassioned insistence and eerie seriousness of a cult leader.
To Clavicular, a symmetrical face and muscular body are the keys to respect, success, romance and satisfaction. With such high stakes at play, his followers are encouraged to ascend from an ugly “subhuman” to a perfectly chiselled “Chad” by any means necessary. Freakishly sculpted influencers provide these looksmaxxers with endless commandments and recommendations, ranging from basic grooming to starvemaxxing and bonesmashing. (The layperson will recognize starvemaxxing as anorexia. The latter involves hitting your face with a hammer to create scar tissue that defines the jawline.)
The trend’s consequences for young Canadian men – increasingly friendless, hopeless and anxious – can be devastating. “At best, it’s a scam to make people money,” says Debra Wells-Hopey, program manager at Eating Disorders Nova Scotia. “At worst, it can cost people their lives.”
Hopey points to 21-year-old John as an example. The young man, whose real name has been changed to protect his identity, regularly attends Hopey’s weekly support group.
At 15, John wasn’t taking the bus to school, playing team sports or meeting up with friends. Like the rest of his peers, he spent many of his formative years mid-pandemic, attending Zoom classes from his home in a rural town. As his sense of isolation deepened, so did his obsession with fitness influencers and the “wild, wild west of supplementation.”
“He started taking [unregulated] supplements and saw weight gain, not muscle gain,” says Hopey. “That sent him down the path of restricting food intake and led to a pretty severe case of low-weight anorexia. He ended up in the eating disorder unit at the hospital on imposed bed rest.” There, John spent two months in a “refeeding” program.
“It’s easy to laugh it off when it’s Clavicular or Mr. Beast,” says Hopey. “But there are folks who become ill from looksmaxxing.” She says that the trend’s popularity among young men is likely related to the pandemic, which laid a groundwork for isolation and instability.
In fact, the Canadian Men’s Health Foundation noted a growing epidemic of loneliness in 2025, with half of Canadian men reporting that they were socially isolated. Young men, aged 19 to 29, felt the loneliest, at 67 per cent.
“There’s probably a relationship between loneliness and falling victim to social media trends in general,” says Marc Lafrance, an associate professor of sociology at Concordia University. “We don’t really teach our boys how to make and keep friends in a meaningful way. So, we could argue that boys are sort of sitting ducks.”
Some take part as a way to exercise control in an ever-chaotic world. For example, on a Reddit thread for University of Waterloo students, one young man asks his peers for counsel on improving his appearance. The poster, who goes by the username fractaltrainer, was rated a 5.9 by a selfie scanner called Looksmax.AI. “With assignments and co-op job hunting, I haven’t been able to sleep super well, which has affected a lot of things downstream, like my diet and my anxiety,” he wrote.
Most young Canadians also feel pessimistic about their job prospects, according to the National Post; unemployment among 15- to 24-year-olds has jumped 57 per cent in the last three years.
Lafrance notes that as unemployment takes a hit on men’s self-esteem, many are improving their bodies as an accessible way to convince themselves and others that they are still successful and masculine.
“The body has become this terrain on which boys and men work through their uncertainty, anxiety, frustration, grievance and not in healthy ways – put all of that together in a big pot and I think what comes out is Clavicular,” he says.
Taking action and seeing results can certainly satisfy the itch for control or validation – but experts agree it’s a slippery slope.
“We begin to think, ‘If a little is good, more is better,’ until it morphs and the control becomes an illusion,” explains Hopey. “What you initially started to gain some sense of stability and control in the world ends up stealing all of that from you – from your health, your friends, family, work, school.”
Kyle Ganson, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Toronto, observed that spiral firsthand while interviewing 21 North American looksmaxxers.
To Ganson, many looksmaxxing practices are fairly harmless. Wearing sunscreen is not a sign that a young man is dealing with serious body-image issues. However, he says looksmaxxers who become consumed with their appearance – bonesmashers, for example – display the same tunnel vision as those with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD).
Obsessive and misguided self-improvement isn’t the only rabbit hole a looksmaxxer might stumble into. Many looksmaxxing influencers tout sexist, far-right beliefs. A Rolling Stone writer who investigated Clavicular’s online academy says the influencer frequently referred to women as “targets” and “slayables.” Men were also encouraged to “dominate” women intellectually.
“All of the men I interviewed used terminology, lingo and ideas that stem from [incel forums],” says Ganson. He adds that while these men weren’t incels themselves, they were exposed to manosphere-type communities while exploring the looksmaxxing universe.
But for some young Canadians, the sparkly promise of restoring men to their apparently lost former glory is the trend’s best selling point. On March 11, Ipsos shared polling results from Canadian men under 35-years-old. Among them, 54 per cent said: “We have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men.”
Lafrance says that as these attitudes thrive, and as women continue to surpass men in higher education, some men are subconsciously bulking up as a way to show superiority.
“If there’s one thing that just about everybody in the manosphere agrees on, it’s that we need to harken back to old models of gender,” he explains. “Working on the body is a way of forcing society to register men as different from women.” The right-wing looksmaxxer might admit that a woman can get a better-paying job than him, for example, so long as she can’t outbench him.
So, where do we go from here?
Lafrance suggests a cautious “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach.
“There’s a role for public health workers and educators to accept that this is something young men are doing, instead of resisting it and pretending it’s not happening,” he says. “Say, ‘OK, if you’re going to ingest large quantities of creatine and protein, here’s how to do that in a way that’s not going to harm your kidneys and liver.’ Let’s join them in a way that is educationally sound.”
Similarly, Lafrance encourages public health professionals to focus on campaigns around social media literacy so that young men can tell the difference between good and bad fitness content. To demonstrate the lack of awareness, he points to a teenage boy at his gym. The 15-year-old became obsessed with working out after watching weightlifting videos on social media but had no idea that his “bro-set,” an influencer-prescribed heavy lifting technique, wasn’t safe for someone so young.
Hopey says that preventative campaigns are especially important when protecting young people from looksmaxxing extremes: “By the time an 18- or 19-year-old guy is coming to us [support workers], he’s in pretty dire straits.”
A boy who isn’t getting his desired results from starvemaxxing likely won’t blame Clavicular and seek professional help, for example. Instead, Hopey says that he’ll see his weight as a personal failure and continue to diet or supplement until the problem worsens.
“We can’t blame individuals who get caught up in looksmaxxing,” she says. “It’s a complicated, perfect storm that can result in lots of mental and physical health issues.”
