Mewing. Mogging. Looksmaxxing. Young men have created a whole new vocabulary for looking better, but beyond the facial rankings, jaw exercises and questionable DIY advice, something bigger is happening: Men are getting serious about their hair, skin and faces. Even in Major League Baseball, Texas Rangers shortstop Corey Seager sees it. “Guys are paying more attention to themselves overall, not just working out, but sleep, skin, hair, all of it,” he says.
Aesthetic physicians are seeing it, too. Nashville, TN plastic surgeon Daniel A. Hatef, MD says his male patient population has “easily doubled.” La Jolla, CA plastic surgeon Robert Singer, MD says motivations span dating to career. “Older patients may want to look fresher because their relationship has changed, or they find younger employees don’t relate to them because they look older,” he says.
“Culturally, guys grow up without the same beauty pressures and beauty education that women do,” says Ian Michael Crumm, aesthetician and founder of Boys in Beauty. Much of that education now comes through social media, where good advice mixes with questionable practices. Dr. Hatef says some patients realize that “starving themselves, injecting sketchy fat dissolvers and taking hammers to their faces are unwise and don’t help their image.” At the other end, men are embracing treatments women have pursued openly for years.
Male Facelifts
What men want often depends on age. New York facial plastic surgeon Konstantin Vasyukevich, MD is seeing more middle-aged men seek facelifts, while Dr. Hatef says younger patients are increasingly interested in building structure. “Male faces tend to have more prominent, angular bone structure and a different pattern of facial fat pad distribution,” Dr. Vasyukevich explains. For older patients, “the goal is to address signs of aging while preserving those masculine characteristics,” he adds.
To achieve this, Dr. Hatef often uses targeted fat grafting, subtle preservation rhinoplasty and facial implants. Palo Alto, CA facial plastic surgeon David M. Lieberman, MD notes that chin augmentation is commonly done on his male patients. “Chin augmentation or structural enhancement can play an important role in creating better harmony between the chin, jawline and overall face.”
Male Eyelid Surgery
Around the eyes, a skilled hand is key, especially with a blepharoplasty. “With male eyelid surgery, the goal is to preserve masculine features by accounting for the lower brow position, fuller eyelids, heavier facial tissue and flatter cheek contour,” Dr. Vasyukevich says. High-profile celebrity results have put bad blephs in the spotlight, adds Palo Alto, CA facial plastic surgeon Sachin S. Parikh, MD. “The best male blepharoplasty results are often the ones that go unnoticed.”
Hair Thinning
For Seager, hair thinning was on his radar early on. “I remember my brother’s hair started thinning out when he was 23 or 24,” he recalls. “When I got to that age myself, it was in the back of my mind, and I wanted to get ahead of it instead of waiting around.” As a professional athlete, Seager is also careful about which supplements he takes. “Everything I put in my body has to be something I trust completely,” he says, referring to Nutrafol’s NSF Certified for Sport hair growth supplements.
Miami dermatologist Heather Woolery-Lloyd, MD, chief medical advisor for Nutrafol, sees the same preventive mindset among younger men. Hair thinning and loss are “often multifactorial,” she says, and as such, men are embracing options from supplements to surgery. “I do think men are talking about it more.” Seager agrees: “Once you bring it up, you realize how many other people are dealing with the same thing.”
Reality Check
There’s a difference between participating in beauty and chasing an algorithmic ideal. Looksmaxxing, Crumm says, can push men toward extreme practices and “a very singular, specific vision of beauty. It’s really important for the industry at its core to guide them in the right way with messaging and advertising, and not feed into the looksmaxxing trend,” he explains. His hope is that men can be “given permission and not made to feel like they should be ashamed of wanting to participate in beauty.” After all, Crumm adds, “At the end of the day, it’s just face moisturizer.”
