Who is Clavicular? The looksmaxxing king who'll do anything to be beautiful

Who is Clavicular? It's a question that's passed through the internet, group chats and coffee catch-ups with increasing frequency over the past few months, each time the tone a little more urgent. He is the looksmaxxer supreme – an influencer whose intense hyper-fixation on achieving aesthetic perfection has very quickly turned him into one of the most famous people on the internet. He streams daily and hangs out with Groyper king Nick Fuentes and notorious misogynist Andrew Tate. He has no discernible interests or personality outside of the pursuit of beauty.

He has more than a million combined followers across all social platforms and recently made his runway debut at New York Fashion Week.

Like it or not, Clavicular's influence is huge – and it's only going to get bigger. As the looksmaxxing phenomenon reaches more young men and intertwines with adjacent toxic ideologies (you know, incels and the manosphere), now is the time to get clued up on exactly who he is and the message he's spreading.

Who is Clavicular?

Born Braden Peters, the 21-year-old influencer is the first properly famous person to come out of the looksmaxxing craze. We'll get more into exactly what that means later, but for now, all you need to know is that for Clavicular, beauty is everything. His ideology goes way beyond typical vanity and seeps into his entire worldview: to him, being handsome is the only surefire way to guarantee success and, consequently, improving your appearance is a man's only worthy pursuit.

It's a beauty doctrine that's extreme in both its inherent nihilism and its methods. Part of the reason Clavicular has become well-known in mainstream culture is because of the shocking techniques he's claimed to use to help him on his journey. This includes but is not limited to: self-injecting internet-bought testosterone from the age of 14; smashing his face with a hammer to encourage sharper bone definition; smoking meth to suppress his appetite.

Clavicular is the kind of guy who insists he doesn't care about politics and doesn't vote. But he's not above using racial slurs, misogynistic language, and generally flouting any normal boundaries of respectability, which naturally means he gets on pretty well with the far-right. Earlier this year, he made headlines after hitting up a Miami club with Tate, Fuentes et al, then requesting and dancing to Ye's widely-banned song “Heil Hitler”.

Oh, and that's actually not the only time Clavicular's made headlines. In December, he courted more controversy after he appeared to run over a man with his Cybertruck during a livestream. In February, he was arrested on suspicion of dangerous drug possession and possession of a forged instrument (AKA a fake ID). And in March, he was arrested with battery charges, after allegedly attacking a woman with his girlfriend.

Keeping up? Because there's more. Clavicular has “ascended” to the god-tier of looksmaxxing partly down to his own dramatic transformation – some may say the before-and-afters could simply be the result of weight loss and puberty, he claims its because of a “The Clavicular System”. If you're curious to know exactly what that entails, you can sign up to learn all his secrets for the small price of $49 a month.

What is looksmaxxing?

Believe it or not, the term “looksmaxxing” has actually been knocking around in incel forums since the 2010s, but it's not until the TikTok era that it really began to take off. In a nutshell, looksmaxxing is essentially a way for men to partake in the punishing, toxic beauty standard that women have had to navigate since, well, ever. On the “softmaxxing” side of things, they're investing in skincare and going to the gym – maybe mewing in an attempt to make their jawlines more defined. On the more extreme “hardmaxxing” end, they're extreme dieting and experimenting with body modifications – either DIY à la Clavicular's hammer, or under a plastic surgeon's knife.

What makes the looksmaxxing community more insidious than your average self-improvement fad, however, is the emphasis on ranking appearances in the community, often using pseudoscience in an attempt to reduce the ineffable concept of human attraction into an equation. (Read the first paragraph of Clavicular's New York Times profile if you want an insight into how this might actually work.) The problem with this way of thinking is that it can – and does – quickly slip into eugenics-coded rhetoric, turning the looksmaxxing community into a hotbed for racism. (Clavicular himself has denied that the community is racist, despite using the N-word himself.) Those who receive a low rating in the looksmaxxing community are often relentlessly bullied, not only for their appearance but for their perceived lack of masculinity.

Looksmaxxing is deeply rooted in the “black pill” ideology that spawned from incel culture. It's a worldview that believes men are oppressed by women – subjected to their manipulations, judgements and superficial whims – and backs these theories up with yet more pseudoscience. With that in mind, looksmaxxing offers a sort of antidote for men who feel (imagined or otherwise) excluded by women, an instructional guide on how to be hotter and subsequently achieve dominance over women and less attractive men. The ultimate goal, it seems, is for these men to reclaim their place at the top of the social hierarchy – all through the virtue of good looks.

Why should I care?

Because these men are becoming increasingly influential. As mentioned earlier, Clavicular walked the runway at New York Fashion Week in February, and has been interviewed by some of the world's biggest media outlets. The looksmaxxing ideology might seem vapid and relatively inconsequential, but it speaks to a broader trend of nihilism amongst young men that's encouraging more individualism and more division – two things that we don't exactly need any more of in the world right now.

There are the obvious pitfalls of looksmaxxing – poor self-image, toxic masculinity, increased body dysmorphia – and then there are the more existential questions it brings up. How do de-programme a generation of young men from believing that women are inherently evil? What happens when culture encourages people to prioritise their appearance above all else? And is it even possible to close the widening gulf between women and men's political leanings? Clavicular probably believes that thinking about these things is a waste of time. And that's precisely the problem.