The creators behind looksmaxxing
Mewing videos, softmaxxing tutorials, and clinical face analysis — three different angles on the same trend, and where larpmaxxing doesn't overlap.
The short version
Looksmaxxing is the internet's term for aggressively optimizing your physical appearance — skincare, grooming, posture, jaw exercises, fitness, sometimes cosmetic procedures — treated as a project with visible before-and-afters rather than a vague aspiration. Like most -maxxing trends, it didn't spread on its own; it spread because specific creators built audiences around it, each occupying a different corner of the spectrum from viral technique videos to full clinical analysis. This page profiles three of them — the creator credited with popularizing mewing, the YouTuber who made the trend feel approachable, and the analysis company that gives it a scientific gloss — and explains where larpmaxxing, a different trend with a similar name, actually fits in.
Dillon Latham: the creator who made mewing go viral
Dillon Latham is a TikTok creator (@dillon.latham) with a following in the seven figures, built almost entirely around jawline and facial-structure content. He's widely credited as the creator most responsible for pushing "mewing" — the tongue-posture technique argued to influence jaw development — into mainstream awareness on TikTok, with his videos on the subject taking off starting around 2019, years before "looksmaxxing" itself became a widely used term. That timing matters: Latham's mewing content predates much of the current looksmaxxing content ecosystem and is frequently cited as one of its origin points. Since then, he's expanded beyond single technique videos into a broader personal brand, including his own grooming and haircare products aimed at the same appearance-focused audience that made his early videos popular.
Brett Maverick: the softmaxxing face of YouTube
Brett Maverick is a YouTube creator with a following of roughly 1.8 million subscribers, occupying what's often called the "softmaxxing" end of the looksmaxxing spectrum: style, grooming, skincare, posture, and confidence-building, presented with an explicitly positive, encouraging tone rather than the more clinical or intense framing found elsewhere in the space. His content leans toward approachable, doable advice — aimed at guys who want to look and feel better without chasing an extreme aesthetic ideal. Maverick has also built his own paid fitness program, extending his content into a product the same way many creators in this space eventually do. Of the figures covered here, he's arguably the most mainstream-facing: the tone reads closer to general self-improvement content than to the more contested corners of looksmaxxing discourse.
QOVES Studio: where looksmaxxing meets clinical science
QOVES Studio isn't a single creator — it's a facial-aesthetics analysis company, and it represents the clinical end of the looksmaxxing spectrum rather than the personality-driven end. QOVES built its reputation on detailed, quasi-academic breakdowns of facial features, symmetry, and proportion, backed by an advisory board that includes plastic surgeons rather than just content creators. Where Dillon Latham and Brett Maverick built audiences around personal brand and technique videos, QOVES built one around analysis: photo breakdowns, feature-by-feature assessments, and content that borrows the language of facial aesthetics research. That framing has made QOVES something like the reference point looksmaxxing discourse points to when it wants to sound scientific rather than trend-driven.
Where larpmaxxing fits
None of this is the community larpmaxxing comes from. Looksmaxxing has an identifiable creator lineage — Dillon Latham, Brett Maverick, QOVES Studio, and others, each with a name, a following, and a specific angle on the trend. Larpmaxxing doesn't have an equivalent cast of characters, because it's not a technique or a body of expertise you can be a specialist in. It's a label applied to a behavior — staging and posting content that performs a lifestyle you're not actually living — and nobody posting that kind of content identifies as "a larpmaxxer" the way someone might identify as a looksmaxxer. For the full breakdown of how the two trends actually differ, see larpmaxxing vs. looksmaxxing; for where the term "larpmaxxing" itself came from, see what is larpmaxxing?