‘They’re just live experiments’: the dark and deadly world of looksmaxxing

A disturbing new docuseries delves deep into a world where men are pushing their bodies to the extreme – and some of them are dying for it If you’ve heard the term looksmaxxing – the manospheric pursuit of male aesthetic beauty via steroids, peptides , cosmetic surgery and total

A disturbing new docuseries delves deep into a world where men are pushing their bodies to the extreme – and some of them are dying for it If you’ve heard the term looksmaxxing – the manospheric pursuit of male aesthetic beauty via steroids, peptides , cosmetic surgery and total commitment – you probably know the name Clavicular . With more than 2 million followers and a cluster of mainstream media profiles , the 20-year-old streamer born Braden Peters has become the chiseled face of a once fringe movement to achieve algorithmically defined good looks by any means necessary, from daily methamphetamines to breaking your jaw with a hammer. Clavicular has courted attention for a nihilistic worldview expressed in blunt, idiosyncratic argot: “hardmaxxing”, “bone smashing”, anything to increase your “SMV” (sexual market value).

Baffling, horrifying or grimly compelling, depending on your view, Clavicular would be a fascinating documentary subject. Indeed, news of a possible Clavicular documentary has percolated all year, after the influencer filed a cease and desist letter against Disney/Hulu for allegedly filming him backstage at a New York fashion show in February. (It’s far from his most serious legal matter this year – last month, he pleaded not guilty to charges that he raped a 17-year-old girl at his family’s Massachusetts home in May 2025.) But the docuseries in question, Get Huge: Looksmaxxing to Death, was never actually about Clavicular, who appears only in publicly available snippets.

It instead trains its focus upstream of the bone-smashing, on the infamous influencer’s influences: the so-called “biohacking” scene that inspired the youths’ fixation on extreme body modification. And in particular, supplement guru Dr Tony Huge and his acolytes, in the aftermath of the suspicious death of his close associate, the “penis enlargement” expert known as “Leo Longevity”. Continue reading...