Gen Z men are spending thousands to get that ‘American Psycho’-Patrick Bateman look
They’re taking it to the max.
Gen Z men are spending thousands of dollars on “looksmaxxing” — a social media trend that’s spurring them to use everything from diet and tongue exercises to Botox and plastic surgery to get a perfectly chiseled face.
“We have a lot of men in our practice seeking facial balancing. For most, this involves creating a strong jawline and a sculpted look,” Dr. Jennifer Levine, an Upper East Side plastic surgeon, told The Post.
Since 2020, she’s seen a 400% increase in 20-something men coming to her practice for jawline treatments.
“Having a square jaw is considered masculine,” she said. “Think [Patrick] Bateman [from “American Psycho”]. Definition and angularity are the goals.”
For Lewis Friedenthal, a 23-year-old Tribeca resident, the aim was looking more like square-jawed Australian fashion model Jordan Barrett than Bateman.
“I wanted a sharper everything,” he told The Post. “I was looking at all these male models and popular looksmaxxing threads. I wanted bone structure like them.”
First he tried “softmaxxing” methods to get the look without surgery. He experimented with tongue exercises called mewing and chewing mastic gum to sculpt his face.
Then he spent $1,000 on Botox to lower his eyebrows and make them look more symmetrical.
“My eyebrows were super uneven. I wanted them to be straighter and lifted at the end … Men want that hunter-eye look,” Friedenthal, a public policy student at New York University told The Post, adding that he will get touch ups, when needed.
Looksmaxxing is just one of several “maxxing” trends big among young men.
Others include smellmaxxing, which entails spending hundreds of dollars on designer fragrances, and gymmaxxing, where dudes go hard on working out.
Maxxing is rooted in the “incel” – involuntarily celibate – community, where men blame women for their poor sex lives, but now it’s appealing to all types of guys.
Kareem Shami, a 23-year-old based in San Diego, Calif., is big in the “softmaxxing” community on TikTok, where he has 1.6 million followers. He uses the handle @syrianpsycho, a reference to his birth country of Syria and, you guessed it, Patrick Bateman.
As a teen, he felt like an outcast as an immigrant and decided to start investing his time and money in skincare and working out, focusing on “what he could control.”
“It’s essentially self-care – it’s anything you do to improve your presentation and the way you appear,” Shami, who has plans to attend law school, told The Post.
Friedenthal ultimately decided to go under the knife, aka “hardmaxxing,” to get the look he desired.
He went to Levine for buccal fat removal — a relatively non-invasive procedure in which lower cheek fat is removed via small incisions inside the mouth — as well as chin fat removal and chin and jawline augmentation. All told, he spent around $7,000 to achieve the sharper look.
“I didn’t need it, but I wanted it,” Friedenthal said of the procedures, which he paid for with money earned from paid internships and working at a spray tan salon.
“My inside is good. I’m very comfortable with my personality,” he said. “To me, it was subtle changes.”
