There's a corner of the internet where teenage boys measure the distance betw...
Young men literally striking their own jaw lines and cheekbones with hard objects in the hopes of reshaping their facial structure.
“Where they've concluded that their bones specifically forward projection of their midface are primarily the reason their life is not working.”
And they built an entire philosophy around this idea. They call it looks maxi. And the protocols they've developed range from genuinely interesting to medically terrifying. That's obsession pointing at the wrong target. And the irony is that the three steps that will actually change how they look don't require a single product, a single procedure for a single tool. It's not your bone structure, it's your collagen, your inflammation levels, your collocation rate, your skin's biological age. And every single one of those is directly shaped by what you do every single day.
Let me show you exactly where I'm now. [Music]
So there's a corner of the internet where teenage boys measure the distance between their eyes with calipers,
where they've concluded that their bones specifically forward projection of their midface, the width of their jaw, the depth of their orbital rims, are primarily the reason their life is not working. And they built an entire philosophy around this idea. Their idea goes like this. Your looks are largely genetic. Your genetics determine your social and romantic outcomes, and most of you drew a bad hand. It's fatalistic. It's dark and it's spread through forms
like wildfire because it gave a generation of young men a reason for why they felt invisible.
“But here's where it gets strange. How do this belief system came one of the most obsessive self-improvement communities on the internet?”
If your bones are your destiny, as these guys decided, then they were going to optimize the hell out of their bones. They call it looks maxing. And the protocols they've developed range from genuinely interesting to medically terrifying, muting, pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth for hours a day. It's based on a real but heavily extrapolated theory about how tongue posture affects pallet development. Bone smashing is exactly what it sounds like. Young men literally striking their own jaw lines
and cheekbones with hard objects in the hopes of reshaping their facial structure. Some are chewing mastigum for three, four, five hours a day trying to hypertrophy their massager muscle, the big muscle in the back of your jaw. Some are training specific neck muscles with weighted harnesses tracking their eye tilt across months of photos, debating whether their cheekbones have positive or negative vector projection. These are not fringe kids. This content gets tens
“of millions of views. And the reason it resonates is the same reason the idea spread in the first place.”
These guys genuinely want to feel like they have agency over how they look and how they move through the world. That instinct is not wrong. They're just aiming at the wrong target. Because when I went and looked at the actual biology underneath this obsession, I found something that should reframe this entire conversation. The core premise that your appearance is a function of your daily biological inputs, not your genetics is real. The research supports it.
The part they get wrong is which inputs actually move the needle. It's not your bone structure, it's your collagen, your inflammation levels, your glycation rate, your skin's biological age, and every single one of those is directly shaped by what you do every single day. Let me show you exactly what I mean. Most people think of alcohol as a social thing, a wind-down thing, a relaxation thing. What they're not thinking about is what it's doing to their skin
every single time they have a drink. In 2021, researchers published a study in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology involving 350 patients from two healthcare centers in Colombia. They were trying to understand what lifestyle factors were driving photo-aging, visible skin changes caused by the cumulative effects of UV radiation, inflammation, and environmental stress. They measured everything, sun exposure, smoking, exercise habits, alcohol consumption, and they had dermatologists evaluate
each patient's degree of photo-aging using a valid clinical scale. What they found was the patients who consumed alcohol showed greater photo-aging progression. And crucially, the researchers found something else. Exercise appeared as a protective factor. People who moved their body showed
significantly less photo-aging than those who didn't. We'll come back to that. But first,
let's get into the mechanism of what alcohol is doing to your skin because when you see it at biological level, you can't unsee it. Alcohol is a diuretic. It pulls water out of your cells, including the cells in your skin, compromising the integrity of that moisture barrier. A dehydrated skin cell doesn't hold on to its structure. It doesn't reflect the light the same way. The fine lines deepen and the texture dulls. Then there's information. Alcohol triggers systemic
inflammatory pathways that directly accelerate the breakdown of collagen and elastin, which are the structural proteins that give your skin its firmness and its elasticity. It completes the antioxidants your skin uses to defend itself against oxidative damage. It suppresses immune function. It's a multi-front attack on everything that keeps your skin looking
Young and it happens every time you drink.
30 days alcohol free. I'm promising you. The difference in your skin will be visible.
“Now let's talk about what happens to your skin when you move your body consistently,”
because the research here is something most people have never heard and it changes how you think
about training. When you exercise, your skeletal muscle doesn't just contract its secrets. Your muscle's function as an endocrine organ. They release signaling proteins called myocides into your bloodstream that communicate with other tissues throughout your entire body. One of those myocides is called interlucin-15 or IL-15. Here's why that matters for your skin. IL-15 travels through your blood and reaches your dermis where it directly stimulates
collagen synthesis by activating mitochondrial biogenesis inside the fiberglass of your skin. Your muscles in your skin are in constant biological communication. An exercise is the signal that tells both of them to rebuild. Researchers demonstrated this in a series of experiments
that showed short-term exercise measurably increased collagen content in the dermis and raised
“mitochondrial DNA levels in the skin tissue. They weren't looking at topical creams or injectables.”
They were looking at what training does to your skin at a structural level. Even further, a comprehensive 2025 review looked at something called skin span. That's the period during which skin maintains a youthful healthy appearance. These guys found that both aerobic and resistant training improved extracellular matrix gene expression increased skin elasticity and thickened the dermis. The tissue was biologically younger after 16 weeks of training. That's a structural improvement
to the skin without spending a single cent. Exercise also reduces proinflammatory cytokines and increases IGF1, a growth factor that supports tissue repair through the body. Chronic low-grade
inflammation is one of the primary drivers of accelerated skin aging and it shows in your face long
before it shows up on the lab panel. When you train consistently and clear that inflammatory burden, that shows on your face too. Now let's talk about food because this is where the biology is both fascinating and remarkably simple. There's a process happening in your body right now called glycation. When you consume refined sugar and rapidly digested carbohydrates, glucose attaches to proteins throughout your body in a non- enzymatic reaction. When that happens in your skin, it attaches to
your collagen fibers and elastin. These glycated structures form what researchers call advanced glycation and products or AGEs kind of appropriately named. These make your collagen brittle, discolored, and resistant to the repair while you sleep. There was a review published in the journal of oxidative medicine in cellular longevity and it confirmed that dietary carbohydrates, especially those from highly processed foods, directly drive skin aging at a cellular level. The accumulation
of AGEs in the dermis is a primary biological mechanism behind skin aging. This is not a theory. It's a well-documented, well-established pathway that the research has been building evidence on for over a decade. Now stack glycation with chronic low-grade systemic inflammation from a processed food diet. Information activates enzymes called matrix-metalloprotonacis, MMPs. These actually degrade the same collagen that glycation is already attacking. So now you've got two mechanisms
working simultaneously, breaking down your skin structure from different directions. We know that giving your body the right raw materials can fix so much, and that same idea applies here.
“Addiquit protein gives you the amino acids required for collagen synthesis. Minimency is an essential”
co-factor in that synthesis, and without it, the process stalls antioxidants from whole foods neutralize the reactive oxygen species that are driving oxidative skin damage. Focus on eating real food, removing processed food, because cutting refined sugar reduces glycation. Eating nutrient-thens whole foods gives your body the raw materials to run and repair. That's the protocol. It doesn't cost anything beyond what you're already spending on groceries. While there's a genetic aspect
of some skin aging conditions, a lot of it is driven or made worse by what's happening inside our bodies. It's reflecting your hydration status, your inflammatory burden, your hormonal health, your collagen production rate, even your oxidative stress load. Everything happening on the inside is being expressed on the outside. Think about those guys with the caliphers again, measuring millimeters between their eyes, tracking eye tilt across months of photographs. That's obsession
pointed at the wrong target. And the irony is that the three steps that will actually change how they look and how they look in 10 years don't require a single product, a single procedure, or a single tool. Cut the alcohol, move your body every day, eat real food, eliminate refined sugar. That's it. It's not glamorous, it's consistent, and your biology doesn't care how many followers the guy selling you, the alternative has. It just responds to what you actually do.
My approach to looks maxing is cheap and easy.
eat real food, and eliminate refined sugar. These three things cost nothing. They require
“consistency and your biology rewards consistency every single time. If you want to go”
deeper in optimizing every system in your body, including your skin health, metabolic function,
hormone balance, and longevity, I really want you to look into my VIP community and becoming
“the ultimate human course. It's a 10 month deep dive that covers the nutritional protocols,”
the training frameworks, and the biological inputs that determine how you look, how you feel,
and how fast you age. VIP members get full access plus monthly live Q&As with me,
“where you can bring me your specific questions and I'll answer them live. Click the link in the”
show notes. You're not aging because of bad genetics, you're aging because of inputs, changing the inputs, you change the alcohol, and that's just science.
