Dark fact about Clavicular and ‘looksmaxxing’: Horrifying ‘hammer’ and injection methods, the cash he is raking in, revolting slurs and drug background revealed by RONAN O’REILLY

Even the least interested passer-by would acknowledge that Braden Peters is a strikingly handsome chap.

With his chiselled jaw and sculpted, gym-honed body, the 20-year-old influencer from Florida, who calls himself Clavicular, is obsessed with his appearance and spends much of his time on social media advising his growing army of followers that they, too, can dramatically improve their looks.

In fact, it is essential to do so to make a success of life, he insists. Good looks bestow a ‘halo effect’ on you, because attractive people do better in all manner of social settings, from romance to career opportunities and much more, he claims.

Clavicular’s message has been taken up with such alacrity that he has become the new poster boy of an internet phenomenon called ‘looksmaxxing’, with an increasing number of social media forums featuring young men dedicating themselves to becoming more handsome.

On the surface, it appears harmless enough. After all, male grooming and pride in one’s appearance have been with us for a long time. And looksmaxxing itself – with roots in incel (involuntary celibate) forums – has been around for more than a decade.

But it has always had a dark side. There is an ever-present element of poisonous misogyny among many looksmaxxers. Dangerous and extreme cosmetic ‘treatments’ have been taking place without medical supervision as young men go to extreme lengths to improve their looks.

They are encouraged by the fact that numerical scores are awarded among looksmaxxing communities for specific physical criteria, including sharp jawlines, striking bone structure, ‘hunter’ eyes which tilt upward towards the temple, as well as impressive muscularity and skin tone.

Clavicular previously altered his own appearance by hitting himself with a hammer to fracture bones in his face with the intention of ‘improving’ them.

What is truly terrifying is that looksmaxxing is now going supersonic, after being popularised and redefined on TikTok and other social media outlets.

This means the phenomenon is reaching new legions of discontented and highly impressionable young teenage boys, all of them predisposed to the ‘manosphere’ subculture represented by the likes of self-proclaimed ‘misogynist’ Andrew Tate, who is facing criminal and civil legal proceedings in several countries over alleged sexual and human trafficking offences (which he denies).

And there is another, desperately concerning aspect.

A trawl of some of these forums reveals not just rampant misogyny but also a horrifying number of vile pro-Nazi comments, including celebratory comparisons between the looksmaxxers’ quest for physical perfection and Hitler’s dream of creating an Aryan master race through eugenics.

There is no evidence that Clavicular himself espouses Nazi rhetoric, but he is certainly at the heart of the modern looksmaxxing phenomenon in the US where these views are regularly circulated.

With more than a million subscribers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms, Clavicular’s popularity has skyrocketed.

He is now offering $49-per-month (£36.50) ‘advanced courses’ for men who are – as he puts it – ‘tired of being invisible to women, tired of getting rejected and tired of watching other guys who won the genetic lottery’ notch up endless sexual conquests. 

In a promotional video, Clavicular – who admits to wearing make-up and eyeliner to help achieve perfection – tells potential customers: ‘I’m not going to sugarcoat this – you have been lied to. They told you [to] just be confident, just be yourself, looks don’t matter – but you and I both know that’s complete bulls***.

‘You see it every day – attractive men get treated differently, they get the girls, they get the respect and they get the opportunities handed to them – while you get nothing.’

He encourages men to take drastic action: ‘I’m talking about completely restructuring your facial aesthetics using pharmacology, extreme methods and protocols people are too scared to even ask about.’

Clavicular is speaking from personal experience. By his own account, he started taking testosterone injections at the age of 14 after developing an interest in bodybuilding.

He eventually moved on to ‘bone-smashing’, which involves repeatedly hitting yourself in the face – ‘whether it be with a hammer or your fists’ – to inflict a series of ‘microfractures’.

Although he now relies on his fists, Clavicular recently told an interviewer: ‘I used to use a hammer, but my parents would go into my bathroom and take it away.’

Clavicular claims the broken bones ‘grow back stronger’ and the result is a ‘more masculine, chiselled’ profile.

He has admitted taking methamphetamine – the most commonly trafficked drug in the US – to suppress his appetite and keep his weight under control. 

And while he already stands at 6 ft 2 in, he also considered a $100,000 (£74,000) leg-lengthening operation that would make him four inches taller – to enhance his ‘presence’ factor. 

In an interview last year, he said: ‘I wanted to get to my goals as quickly as possible. I do not care about side-effects. I don’t care about any implications.’

What fazes the medical fraternity, though, is that so much of the advice posted online is being presented as validated science. 

As Dr Stuart Murray, director of the eating disorders programme at the University of Southern California, told the BBC: ‘It’s really shocking. The TikTok stuff out there is not evidence-based but it’s reported as fact.’

At the beginning, the online activity largely centred around disgruntled men exchanging tales of woe about their romantic shortfalls, often involving being overlooked in favour of more sexually appealing peers.

But the emphasis then shifted towards what these incels – mainly teenage boys and young men who believed women were ‘denying them the chance to find love and sex because of the way they look’ – could do to make themselves more attractive to potential partners.

Various strategies – and a new language – came into being: ‘starvemaxxing’ (extreme fasting), ‘whitemaxxing’ (using moisturising products to make one’s complexion appear paler) and ‘roidmaxxing’ (abusing anabolic steroids) were among the most popular.

Others included ‘mewing’ (placing your tongue against the roof of your mouth in a bid to improve jawline structure), as well as ‘edging’ and ‘gooning’ (which both involve avoiding climax during sexual activity to improve looks through elevated testosterone levels).

It’s important to note that not everyone takes the extreme ‘hardmaxxer’ path like Clavicular; some are happy sticking to a daily moisturiser. 

But with online communities offering spaces for participants to share their transformations, and for others to score their progress, the pressure to use extreme measures is relentless. 

For the average looksmaxxer, the aim is to improve their ‘sexual market value’ (SMV) with the distant goal of becoming a ‘Chad’ (a good-looking male who appears to have plenty of sexual opportunities). A typical Chad will be on intimate terms with a ‘Stacy’ (an attractive woman).

In December 2018, the Sunday Times quoted a 34-year-old Briton, who had just lost his virginity after working on his appearance for three years. He said: ‘I will keep on looksmaxxing [because] I want a better life for myself. Moreover, I will pump and dump every woman I cross paths with and humiliate them.’

It is bravado of a deeply unpleasant sort, of course, but not untypical of the misogyny underpinning the phenomenon – misogyny fuelled by anger over so-called ‘unequal sexual distribution’.

And then there are the distasteful links with far-Right extremism.

On the internet forum looksmax.org, one individual posted that ‘everything about Nazi Germany was amazing’. 

They added: ‘There would be no incels now if Hitler had won the war. Through eugenetics [sic] progress, subhumans would’ve been eradicated within two generations. We would all be Chads and Stacies, enjoying life to the fullest. Why the f*** did Hitler have to lose.’

On another site, looksmaxxing.com, a different contributor wrote: ‘Nazis were very in tune with nature. If you observe human societies, we are literally hardwired to split into clans or factions [and] then war against each other until the side with better genetics/stronger group dynamics comes out winning.’

A study at the UK’s Centre of Emerging Technology and Security suggested that ‘young men in so-called ‘looksmaxxing’ communities are [being] directed towards increasingly extreme, age-inappropriate and violent intel and neo-Nazi content’.

An Ofcom audit of internet users’ experiences of the manosphere, published last June, found much of the online advice about looksmaxxing to be ‘extreme’. One participant, a teenager named Liam, said: ‘There’s things like you don’t drink water for 24 hours . . . there’s things like that where it’s almost dangerous to your health.’

Another teenage participant, Ollie, said he had seen online content which alleged that repeatedly jumping up and down will ‘create microfractures in your [leg] bones and these microfractures will eventually heal over time and they’ll [the bones] become longer and longer’. He said looksmaxxing appealed to him ‘because I knew I could change myself facially along with my height’.

Safeguarding experts at SSS Learning highlighted the dangers of looksmaxxing – and urged British school leaders to be on the alert for ‘sudden changes in grooming, diet or exercise’ in pupils as well as ‘frequent self-deprecating comments about being ‘ugly’ or not good enough.’

While there is no suggestion that Clavicular supports or condones Nazi ideology, one cannot escape the fact that many of the body-altering procedures he advocates carry echoes of policies pursued under Hitler’s regime.

Aside from the six million people murdered in concentration camps and the estimated 400,000 made to undergo sterilisation, the Third Reich’s eugenics programme of ‘racial hygiene’ forced countless others to endure painful and humiliating tests to determine their so-called Aryan purity. 

These included craniometry procedures where individuals had their skull dimensions measured and analysed.

A University of Virginia researcher hinted at Nazi connotations in an article last year condemning ‘looksmaxxing’s obsession with rating people through ‘scores’ and ‘market values’ [which] shows just how entrenched this trend is in pseudoscience and the dehumanising nature of eugenics.

‘And while most people would not admit to supporting eugenic ideologies, championing ‘desirable traits’ while attempting to rid people of ‘undesirable’ ones does echo past justifications for eugenic practices.’

Meanwhile, Clavicular fed into the vile master race mythology – unwittingly or otherwise – by advising his followers: ‘When people under the height of 6ft start talking, just turn your brain off.’ 

He was also widely condemned for casually using the N-word during an online broadcast – and then sporting a baseball cap with the N-word emblazoned across the front.

Clavicular’s ongoing ‘bromance’ with the hugely divisive US podcaster Nick Fuentes – often described as a white nationalist – is arguably the most controversial aspect of it all. Fuentes, 27, has previously dismissed the October 7 attacks on Israel as ‘all a lie’ and likened the deaths of Jews in the Nazi gas chambers to ‘cookies’ baking in an oven.

His other comments include: ‘Jews are running society, women need to shut up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise.’

Fuentes, who has described himself as a ‘proud incel’, has also spoken about his motivation. ‘I have no interest in sex at all,’ he remarked. ‘I am interested in a total Aryan victory and that is what gets me off.’

Braden Peters (Clavicular), who did not respond to a request for comment, was educated at private Setan Hall Preparatory School in New Jersey.  

In 2024, he began studying for a business management degree in Connecticut. But he was kicked out of university within a month after he ‘got caught with a bunch of steroids’. In an interview, he said: ‘So that’s what kind of forced me into my social media career.

‘I lasted about three weeks at university before getting expelled. So I was, like, I guess I have to start doing social media now.’

His shock antics have not stopped since. Footage from Christmas Eve appeared to show him running over an alleged stalker who had been clinging to the bonnet of his Tesla Cybertruck. Police in Miami, where the incident happened, later said that no charges would be pressed.

This came after Clavicular injected fat-dissolving peptides into his unnamed teenage girlfriend’s face during a live broadcast. He used an antiseptic swab to wipe the 17-year-old’s cheek before inserting the needle. ‘We’re looksmaxxing her. It’s all good,’ he said. ‘She’s about to be lean as f***.’

One X user remarked: ‘This is mentally ill.’ Another commented: ‘OMG that is so scary!!!!! He could mess her up so bad!!!!!!!’

Clavicular recently admitted that his intake of synthetic testosterone has affected his reproductive system. ‘Right now, I am infertile . . . I’m not able to have a kid right now,’ he said.

Even though he insists there is a way of ‘immediately’ reversing the situation, it sounds like a supreme irony. Clavicular’s quest for physical perfection has rendered him incapable – at least temporarily –of contributing to a 21st-century master race.