You’re priced out of “looksmaxxing.” That’s the point.

Once the exclusive domain of the girls’ club, extreme aesthetic intervention is best understood as a side effect of upper-class ennui.

In retrospect, the first signal that the stakes of modern aesthetic intervention were rising was when the men started punching themselves in the face.

It was all well and good when it was the ladies paying thousands of dollars to have their epidermis medically burned off to produce a marginally smoother appearance or injecting a bacterium-produced¹ neurotoxin into the folds of their face every few months to freeze them in place. That was time-honored feminine maintenance. But the boys taking hammers to their jaws to maximize orbital bone width, preferably resulting in a visible gonial angle (~120°, according to the ChatGPT-inflected LOOKSMAXX BIBLE: UNLOCKING MALE AESTHETIC EXCELLENCE)? It was clear then that a preoccupation with appearance had escaped its gendered containment.

Extreme physical modification has, among its adherents, taken on the fervor and reverence of a ritual sacrifice. A 2024 article in the journal Aesthetic Plastic Surgery found that cosmetic procedures were up 40% from pre-pandemic levels. Zoe Dubno’s recent piece in The Cut attributes much of this uptick to a pervasive feeling that we lack control: how the body becomes a site where one can exert one’s will when all else fails. A scarcity-fueled, capitalist marketplace devoid of third spaces is bound, the theory goes, to make at least some portion of us sit on vibrating plates under a chicken lamp every morning because something something lymphatic drainage.

A year ago, I would’ve endorsed this analysis as the beginning and end of the obsession with self. I would’ve told you (and probably did, come to think of it) that all this expensive self-care was merely a means for Big Hot to extract what little time and capital you possessed, which of course you would’ve otherwise spent radicalizing yourself with classics like The Feminine Mystique and The Communist Manifesto. Upon another year of reflection, I’m not so sure this tidy and moralized framework reflects the facts on the ground, when one considers who specifically is engaging in this behavior.

The cataloged habits and purchasing patterns of the profiled subjects in pieces like Dubno’s often read as though someone were set loose in Sephora on a heroic dose of LSD. One such looksmaxxer, Nurse Miranda,² links her “Everything Shower” products in an Amazon Storefront. The total, Dubno notes, comes to $2,500. Maintaining Nurse Miranda’s supplement routine costs $740 per month. In February, fashion writer Laura Reilly went viral for posting her “American Psycho-level beauty routine,” which included at various points “Botox, Emface, IPL, scheduled Moxi / broadband light, [an] orthodontist, cardiologist, GP, OBGYN, ophthalmologist, dermatologist, plastic surgeon, trainer, and pilates instructor.”

That a routine ostensibly devoted to beauty would involve six different medical professionals is notable, given the timing of the revelation: A month before Reilly’s post, Affordable Care Act subsidies had expired. Nearly 5 million more Americans are expected to lose their health insurance this year. Reilly’s current skincare routine is composed of “6-8 steps,” “17 pills” (20 on Mondays), and “a peptide taken subQ” (I believe “subQ” means she injects herself). She reports engaging with “at least 5 high-tech tools” from a “home device library,” which appear to be, mostly, a gaggle of lamps emitting different frequencies of light. She readily admits that she is “n=1,” describing herself in the clinical language of the laboratory as a singular sample, but Dubno reports for The Cut that her conversations with other sheepish Los Angeles women about Reilly’s routine confirmed that, to quote her source, “this is, like, average.”³

No choice but to respect the fact that Nurse Miranda’s morning routine gives Clavicular acolytes a “You merely adopted the dark, I was born in it” run for their money.

It is most certainly not “average” at a population level, but I buy that it’s average for a certain class of people.⁴ That aesthetic trends have adopted a health-and-medicine tinge at this particular moment—routines that are definitionally exclusive due to their sheer expense—presents an inconvenient question for the common “it’s about a lack of control” hypothesis: If participation is assumed to be a balm for capitalism’s worst offenses, but only the comparatively privileged⁵ (those with thousands of dollars in excess monthly income and platinum PPO health insurance) are participating, then who is in control?

Most NPR-listening Americans are likely now familiar with the phrase “K-shaped economy,” so-named for the diverging shape of its graph, in which different groups or industries experience radically disparate versions of reality. The extreme nature of what we’ve humiliatingly agreed to call “looksmaxxing” is less a commentary on the Average Joe’s capitalism coping mechanisms and more an unsettling example of this K-shaped divergence playing out on our faces, where a vanishingly small segment of the population with access to a fleet of concierge doctors, disposable income, and an interest in slowly turning themselves into wax figures is injecting their own ass fat into their dark circles, while roughly one-third of Americans skip the doctor altogether because they cannot afford to go. As canary in the bourgeois anti-aging coal mine Bryan Johnson proved back in 2021, weird shit is wont to happen when society is constructed according to the whims of, oh, I don’t know, the four jabronis who host the All-In Podcast, men who presumably see no issue with the fact that 70% of the country’s wealth is controlled by roughly 20% of its citizens, and on an exponential curve at that.

The socially liberal, fiscally conservative sleep paralysis demons you’ll encounter if you spend too much time on X, also known as the cohosts of the All-In Podcast. I cannot emphasize enough how sinister I find their entire operation. Will not explain.

To fixate on whether all this body modification is actually empowering and liberatory or dystopian and embarrassing is to overlook its more illustrative lens: as a physical manifestation of what happens when resources coagulate in a small segment of society, one that is increasingly bored by its own satiation.

The desirous masses, to the extent they express interest in adopting these bloodletting-as-skincare routines and procedures, can be understood not as necessarily desiring the interventions themselves, but instead lusting after the sort of lifestyle and access to resources that would permit them to freely spend thousands of dollars on things like incrementally improving their hairline.

What we’ve identified as a story about control is little more than a campy rendering of inequality, where a minuscule fraction of people have too much money and time and therefore must invent new needs to satisfy, while far more people have too little. For everyone else, the consolation prize is that the maintenance itself looks mostly miserable.

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• A distressing character study of alt-right streamer Nick Fuentes’s most devoted fans (so many in Ohio…?), as defined by how much they donate during his streams. Fuentes has earned around $900,000 since the beginning of 2025. (The Washington Post)

• 80% of Americans pay more in payroll taxes (the 7.65% Medicare and Social Security charge applied to every dollar you earn) than income taxes. Surely it’s a good omen that Ezra Klein is using his platform to advocate for tax reform. (The New York Times)

• I’m starting a Jamie Ding fan club. Let me know if you want in. (Wall Street Journal)

• Poverty is an inevitable outcome of our chosen economic structure, one based on “capital accumulation with mainly privately owned goods markets,” says this “economist [who’s] on food stamps.” It is a feature, not a bug, that a portion of the population cannot earn enough to survive. Programs like Medicaid and SNAP, in that sense, are necessary fixtures for the marketplace’s continued functioning. (Current Affairs)

• A new book called How to Get Rich in American History reviews how “financial advice” has changed over the last 300 years. “The ‘history’ everyone says proves stocks are always good for the long run is less than a century old,” the author points out, “which in my line of work is a rounding error.” Given that quote, you’d think this book is pessimistic or anti-capitalist. Not at all. (Bloomberg)

• I can’t put down Lena Dunham’s new memoir Famesick. Everyone’s fixated on the stories about Adam Driver and Jack Antonoff, but it was the financial revelations that most titillated me. It’s a tie between the reference to the $3 million advance she received for her first book, and being pressured by co-showrunner Jenni Konner to demand that HBO divert some of her (Lena’s) salary to Jenni, dressed up in “Girlboss buzzwords” about “pay equality” and “transparency.” “It never occurred to me at the time that Jenni did not have to live the story I was living,” she writes of being the “face” of Girls.

• In a similarly stomach-turning indictment of fame (but not, it should be said, riches), this breakdown of the Beckham family feud—between Brand Beckham and eldest son Brooklyn Beckham, duly flanked by his billionaire heiress wife’s family—pointed out the logic of Brooklyn’s apparently shifted loyalty. When you’re rich because you’re a public figure like Posh and Becks, your entire life becomes an exhausting gambit to retain relevance. Not so with Brooklyn’s oligarchic in-laws, who get wealth and privacy. He seems to have chosen the latter. (The Cut)

• A Kentucky tenants’ union won big against a neglectful out-of-state landlord, thanks to an obscure law. When renters in a 55-unit apartment complex began organizing, the retaliation—like legal notices which implied forthcoming evictions—began immediately. But a Kentucky state law currently active in four counties (local governments can opt into it) dictated that any rent increases, decreased services, or eviction threats that occurred within one year of tenant organizing would be presumed retaliatory. This legal protection proved transformative for their effort. A good reminder that without a legislative system that creates opportunity and protections, organizing of any kind is all but impossible. (In These Times)

1. Clostridium botulinum, to be specific

2. Not to be confused with Nurse Morgan, a jaunty LA-area drag queen I found whilst looking for Nurse Miranda

3. Editor’s note from Mallory: “I do need to say that I think The Cut is a plastic surgery normalization psyop.”

4. I think this observation is more obvious now that men are embracing a desire for self-optimization with as much fervor as women; before, the conversation was too clouded with light misogyny (women be shoppin’) for class to fully come to the foreground

5. The bootleg Clavicular Looksmaxxing PDF notes that “attractive people” are “perceived as more intelligent, more trustworthy, better leaders,” and “more competent in jobs, sales, and dating,” creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in which those already most able to afford the beauty-routine-as-status-symbol maintenance solidify their positioning