20-year-old live-streamer and influencer Braden Eric Peters, known online as Clavicular, has recently gained mass attention for several reasons, each worse than the last. Primarily, he is known for being the face of “looksmaxxing,” an online community that targets young men focused on augmenting their physical appearance and promoting extreme behaviors to do so. Peters is just now gaining national attention, but the story of his rise to infamy begins long before that.
Peters grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, with his parents and younger sister. He described himself as a “socially awkward teenager” and attributed this to being on the autism spectrum. When he began attending Seton Hall Preparatory School, he recalled being bullied and relentlessly made fun of by classmates and peers online.
According to Peters, he began these destructive cosmetic tendencies at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, at 14 years old. His parents had to confiscate hammers to prevent him from“bonesmashing,” a dangerous technique that involves hitting facial bones with hard objects in an attempt to have a stronger jawline.
After more time in isolation, the “looksmaxxing” mechanisms only became more extreme. He would attempt to pull out facial fat with a syringe and began taking Anabolic-Androgenic Steroids, an illicit synthetic form of testosterone that helps with muscle-building. Once caught, his parents kicked him out and sent him to live with his grandmother.
In 2024, Peters began attending Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Less than a month after moving in, he was reported to the school administration for hiding testosterone in his dorm room, and was immediately expelled. This marked the beginning of a series of outrageous and problematic behavior online, and the further he went, the more he was rewarded with likes and views.
Most of his content relied on finding newer tactics to achieve physical perfection, which he refers to as “ascension.” He received backlash for encouraging his young fans to undergo irreversible cosmetic procedures after receiving a bimaxillary osteotomy, or “double-jaw surgery.” However, the objections to his lifestyle only fueled more drastic measures
It wasn’t long before Peters started to promote the usage of methamphetamine hydrochloride (crystal meth) as well as dextroamphetamine-amphetamine (unprescribed Adderall.) His destructive tendencies were rapidly becoming more mainstream, and his fanbase only grew larger.
The term “looksmaxxing” originates from a 2015 Reddit forum. It then made its way into 4chan and other public forums throughout the late-2010s, until it reached the mainstream on TikTok in late 2021. Very quickly, the term became associated with the “manosphere” subculture, which was created as an opposition to feminism, leading to the rise of controversial figures like Andrew Tate.
Tate’s rise was one of the biggest indicators of the “red pill,” which depicts the process of young men consuming content about social dominance, which then trains their algorithm to feed them misogynistic content from users like Joe Rogan and Adin Ross, ultimately leading them to alt-right extremist figures like Nick Fuentes. A parallelled version of this term, “black pill,” describes a similar algorithmic rabbit hole that leads these men into the “looksmaxxing” trend.
Because of men like Peters, the manosphere is quickly moving in a dark direction. Terms like “foid” meaning “female humanoid” were popularized on TikTok in the last year to continue the cycle of dehumanizing women and teaching impressionable minds that humans have no value beyond physical appearance.
Peters is complicit in keeping beauty standards unrealistic and keeping men’s self-esteem as low as possible, but this is only because he was a victim of his own crime. His deep insecurity made him the perfect target for the post-COVID shift where plastic surgery and beautification for men was normalized after their primarily female consumer base had run out. Using the same mechanism that has been used to maintain the beauty standard for women for centuries, Peters is just another pawn used to destroy the mental health of thousands of young men. This comes directly after the “men’s mental health” movement, underscoring how fast the culture changes once people aren’t being profited off of anymore.
Whether his clicks and views come from people who are laughing at his ridiculous vocabulary, or from a new generation of deeply diffident young men, the damage has already been done and it won’t be long before a current Clavicular superfan takes his place.