Leisa Mari Bekkers lives in New South Wales, where she is raising two teenagers she describes as her life’s work. Aged 14 and 19, neither has ever taken a pharmaceutical drug. “Not even an aspirin,” she told me. During both pregnancies, she avoided ultrasounds. Her aim was to keep them as untouched as possible — to give them, in her view, the best chance of growing up beautiful and strong.
And yet, despite her best efforts, they were not beautiful enough.
Their faces, she worried, had not developed as they should have: as toddlers, their palates were too narrow, their jaws insufficiently defined. She suspected this was because there wasn’t enough organic food where they live. Taking matters into her own hands, she breastfed both kids until they were three and a half.
“Breastfeeding is the beginning of ‘mewing’,” she said last November, referring to a DIY technique designed to improved one's jawline. It offers “the best possible start in life”. After that, she added, children can begin “boot camp”.
The online boot camp in question is run by a 20-year-old British influencer named Oscar Patel. Bekkers is an active member, instructing her children — who are homeschooled — in a practice known as “thumb-pulling”, which involves the physical manipulation of one’s jaw and palate. Patel promises it can reshape your face and, consequently, your life.
Looksmaxxing, as this wider ecosystem is known, is typically considered the preserve of teenage boys: a corner of the online manosphere populated by discussions of jawlines, bone structure, and self-improvement taken to strange extremes. But Bekkers is not an outlier.
I’ve spent the past month enrolled in Patel’s online course. After every session, it became increasingly clear that our singular focus on boys in the looksmaxxing sphere has masked another growing group of devotees: their mothers.
At the centre of the looksmaxxing world is a platform called Skool. It is, in effect, a monetised forum, similar to a lawless Patreon. Influencers charge a monthly fee for access to their “communities”, where advice and routines are shared with paying members.
Of the dozens of looksmaxxing courses on Skool, Oscar Patel’s is the largest. Roughly 6,500 people pay $39 a month to subscribe to his programme, hundreds of them middle-aged women. By comparison, the course run by Clavicular, one of the internet’s most prominent looksmaxxers, has fewer than 1,000 members. Across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, Patel has amassed more than 1.7 million followers, who he then funnels into his course.
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