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STEPHEN IMEH WANTED to make history. He’d never really dreamt of being an influencer, but in April he noticed an opportunity to break through.
There were virtually no looksmaxxers—people who spend enormous amounts of effort to glow up—who looked like him, and he wanted to change that. So he made a plan. Imeh posted a workout video on TikTok, with plans for more, and updated his bio to “FIRST BLACK LOOKSMAXXER.”
But as soon as the 20-year-old Houston-based college student posted the video, he was bombarded by racist comments. “I don’t think even an hour went by and I was getting comments like, you’re a monkey, you’re an n-word hard r,” he says. Another comment suggested Imeh “just be white,” or “jbw” as it’s known in incel circles. None of it made sense to him. “I was like, wait, what?”
It wasn’t Imeh’s first encounter with looksmaxxing, the online movement most prominent among young men that emerged from incel culture and took off on TikTok in 2023, which promotes maximizing your physical attractiveness. In 2022, Imeh was a junior at a predominantly white high school in Texas that only had “three other Black kids,” and he wasn’t fitting in. He decided to search for self-improvement tips online. “I googled ‘How to look better’ and the number one thing was looksmaxxing,” he says. Suggestions included a tongue exercise called mewing, working out, healthier eating habits, even plastic surgery. Imeh only lasted two weeks before he called it quits. “It was kinda cringe.” But because it happened the year before looksmaxxing blew up on TikTok, he says, “I didn’t tell anyone about it.”
