Social Media Face-Off: What’s Keeping Plastic Surgery Influencers Up at Night

For the curious or naive, Instagram and TikTok are great demystifiers of celebrity plastic surgery. I only recently learned this (belatedly) after making an offhand comment to friends about how well and naturally I thought Emma Stone was aging.

Egg on my face — and apologies to Stone for dragging her into this — because, over the next 24 hours, my group chat lit up with forwarded posts of doctors annotating her mug like it was a football replay. They dropped terms like surgical brow lift, blepharoplasty and endoscopic facelift. Each procedure is delivered after a “possible,” the allegedly in the courtroom of social media, though the tone leaves little room for doubt. These are professionals, pulling back the hospital curtain.

Educated speculation made these plastic surgeons and aesthetics experts niche stars in their own right. And since they’ve infiltrated my algorithm, I’ve noticed that many are starting to use their platforms for more than analyzing actresses and posting before-and-after shots of their own clientele. Social media’s doctors are suddenly anxious to debunk the gospel of looksmaxxers.

“There are people out there recommending hitting yourself in the face with a hammer,” says Dr. Tony Youn, a Michigan-based plastic surgeon whose Instagram followers top 1.9 million, referring to Clavicular’s (somewhat dubious) origin story. “The whole thing is a bit of a cry for help.”

Looksmaxxing, primarily targeting young men, was long an obscure self-improvement movement, but recent coverage has made their subculture (and its many subdivisions) all but unavoidable. There are the softmaxxers, who tend to fall under the umbrella of general wellness with posts about skin care routines and exercise tips. And then there are the problem children, hardmaxxers, who advocate for more extreme measures such as drug use, potentially damaging manipulations of their skin and the aforementioned “bonesmashing.”

Youn credits the rise of the looksmaxxer, like so many of the internet’s unwanted gifts, to the Dunning-Kruger effect: the tendency for people with little knowledge to platform themselves as experts. Misleading anecdotal information has never been in short supply online. AI has arguably fostered its unchecked proliferation. And now there are young, mostly white men with symmetrical faces and high follower counts to repeat their RFK Jr.-esque proclamations with authority, with 20-year-old Clavicular as the movement’s poster child.

“He’s spoken about using crystal meth,” says Dr. Jonny Betteridge, a London aesthetics doctor and popular commentator on celebrity transformation. (Betteridge is referring to a December 2025 podcast during which Clavicular claimed to be using the drug as an appetite suppressant.) “My biggest concern is the younger people who are consuming this content. How do they distinguish between what is actually going to benefit them and what is just designed to attract attention?”

Several arrests and cozying up with the far right have done nothing to slow the rise of Clavicular, né Braden Peters. He walked the runway during June’s Paris Fashion Week for Guillermo Andrade’s 424. But even if his profile suffers some steep descent — like he claims his nose has after a late-spring rhinoplasty that he chose to livestream — there are many others waiting in the wings. Not that it’s all hammers to the face and methamphetamines. Some of it is just an extreme version of your grandmother who used to futilely pat the bottom of her chin to fix that waddle.

A video from earlier in 2026, during which German looksmaxxer Marvin Würzner offered a tutorial on how to achieve “hunter eyes,” resurfaced this summer as the subject of widespread mockery across plastic surgery Instagram. Hunter eyes, by the way, are marked by a piercing, intense gaze that looksmaxxers have deemed masculine and, thus, very desirable. Würzner claims to have achieved his by aggressively pulling the skin on either side of his face back with his palms and squinting over and over and over — his lids doing little crunches, like they’re at Barry’s Bootcamp on eye day.

“What’s to debunk here?” said Houston-based dermatologist Dr. Andrea Suarez, who compared his behavior to huffing glue on TikTok. “Squeezing your head is not going to change the shape of your eyes.”

In another stitch of Würzner’s video, ocular plastic surgeon Dr. Kami Parsa, who has a Beverly Hills practice, suggested that it might change his eyes. Just not in the intended way. He claimed that prolonged skin pulling like that depicted in Würzner’s video could ultimately require corrective work.

Let’s throw the Hippocratic oath out the window for a moment. A cynic could argue that looksmaxxing, to a plastic surgeon, is just bad for business. After all, a DIY approach to anything has only ever benefited hardware stores. But plastic surgeons are not the only ones sounding the alarm. Child psychologists, medical schools and myriad doctors with no investment in aesthetics or social media have been speaking out against it. Men’s health nonprofit Movember surveyed over 3,000 men aged 16-25 from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, and found that nearly two-thirds of them were regularly engaging with masculinity influencers.

Youn, whose first foray into commentary was with his now-defunct aughts blog celebcosmeticsurgery.com, devotes only a fraction of his social media output to celebrities or looksmaxxers. But his rationale for speculating about the elective procedures of some public figures is not dissimilar from why he’s so riled up about looksmaxxing. “It’s important for the general public to realize that some celebrities don’t look this amazing naturally, though they may tell you they just drink a lot of water,” says Youn. “It’s always a disservice when people have an unrealistic expectation of how they’re supposed to look.”

There have been no reports of an uptick in self-inflicted hammer wounds since looksmaxxing put the notion out into the digital ether. But as mainstream coverage of looksmaxxing continues and people like Clavicular are platformed by the fashion establishment, professionals across the beauty ecosystem are still uneasy.

Melinda A. Farina, a prominent personality in the aesthetics space, runs Beauty Brokers Inc. Her consultancy firm, which she says works with 10,000 clients annually (some of them celebrities), matches prospective patients with plastic surgeons based on their budgets and the kind of procedures they’re looking for. She bemoans the doctors who use social media to speculate about actresses and actors. “It screams of desperation,” she says.

But looksmaxxing seems to have Farina just as alarmed as the doctors now trying to discredit them: “Whenever safety is called into question, that’s when doctors should be raising their voices,” she says. “Let’s talk about this and not what celebrities are doing.”

This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter’s July 2026 issue “The New Face of Hollywood.” Click here to read more.