‘Did you ever think that maybe there’s more to life than being really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking?’ So asks Derek Zoolander, before pulling his trademark pout, exhibiting cheekbones that look like they were engineered by Brunel. Zoolander came out a quarter-century ago, but now looks prophetic. Ben Stiller’s gullible, self-obsessed moron would fit right in to today’s world of extreme male vanity.

You must take methamphetamines, inject testosterone aged 14 and spend $35,000 on a double-jaw surgery

You must take methamphetamines, inject testosterone aged 14 and spend $35,000 on a double-jaw surgery

Of course, humans, and, dare I say it, especially a certain type of man, have always been vain. However, for all the time Louis XIV or Rudolf Nureyev spent on their appearance, they did have other strings to their bows. Not so the young men in thrall to the surreal online subculture of ‘looksmaxxing’. The very name sounds like it was devised by the functionally illiterate, probably because it was. The basic tenet of looksmaxxing is that all that matters in life is enhancing your physical attractiveness by any means necessary. The cult’s high priest is a 21-year-old from New Jersey called Braden Peters, known by his alias Clavicular. The TikTok streamer claims he chose his name because he is, in his own words, ‘an online autist’. We might speculate that his choice of name, inspired by the Latin for ‘a little key’, reveals more intimate details than he intended.

For all that looksmaxxing is a modern phenomenon – dependent on social media and the particular insanity and inanity of........

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