For the curious or naive, Instagram and TikTok are a great tool for demystifying celebrity plastic surgery. I recently learned this (lately) after I made an offhand comment to my friends about how I thought Emma Stone was aging well and naturally.
Egg on my face — and I apologize to Stone for dragging her into this — because, over the next 24 hours, my group chat lit up with forwarded posts of doctors commenting on her mug as if it were a replay of a soccer match. They dropped terms like surgical brow lift, blepharoplasty, and endoscopic facelift. Each action is delivered after ‘possible’. Allegedly In the social media courtroom, though, the tone leaves little room for doubt. These are professionals, pulling back the hospital curtain.
Educated speculation has made these plastic surgeons and beauty experts stars in their own right. Since they hacked my algorithm, I’ve noticed that many people have started using their platforms for more than just analyzing actresses and posting before-and-after shots of their clients. Social media doctors are suddenly eager to debunk the gospel of appearance.
“There are people who recommend hitting themselves in the face with a hammer,” says Dr. Tony Yoon, a Michigan-based plastic surgeon with 1.9 million Instagram followers, referring to Clavcular’s (somewhat dubious) origin story. “The whole thing is a cry for help.”
Looksmaxxing, primarily aimed at young people, has been a vague self-improvement movement for a long time, but recent coverage has made its subculture (and its many offshoots) inevitable. There are softmaxxers, who tend to fall under the general health umbrella with posts about skincare routines and exercise tips. Then there is the problem of children, who advocate more extreme measures such as drug use, potential manipulation of their skin and the aforementioned “bone-crushing”.
Yoon attributes the rise of cuteness, like many unwanted gifts on the Internet, to the Dunning-Kruger effect: the tendency of people with little knowledge to present themselves as experts. Anecdotal misinformation has never been rare on the Internet. It can be said that artificial intelligence has increased its spread unchecked. And now there are young people, mostly white men with identical faces and large followings, repeating their RFK Jr.-themed statements with authority, with the 20-year-old collarbone figure as the movement’s poster child.
“He talked about using crystal meth,” says Dr. Johnny Bettridge, a London-based plastic surgeon and popular commentator on celebrity transformations. (Betteridge points to a December 2025 podcast in which Clavcular claimed to use the drug as an appetite suppressant.) “My biggest concern is young people who are consuming this content. How can they differentiate between what will actually benefit them and what is just designed to attract attention?”
Numerous arrests and close proximity to the far-right have done nothing to slow the rise of the Clavicle Party, née Braden Peters. He walked the runway during Paris Fashion Week in June for Guillermo Andrade’s 424 show. But even if his profile has taken a few steep drops — as he claims his nose did after a late-spring rhinoplasty that he chose to broadcast live — there are many others waiting in the wings. Not that it’s all about hammers to the face and meth. Some are just an extreme version of your grandmother who used to futilely pat the bottom of her chin to fix the wobble.
A video from earlier in 2026 in which German makeup artist Marvin Wurzner gave a tutorial on how to achieve “hunter eyes” resurfaced this summer as the subject of widespread plastic surgery ridicule on Instagram. By the way, hunter’s eyes are characterized by a piercing and intense look that looks masculine and therefore very desirable. Würzner claims he achieved his goal by forcefully pulling the skin on either side of his face back with his palms and squinting repeatedly—his eyelids doing a slight grind, like at Barry’s Bootcamp on Eye Day.
“What is exposing here?” said Houston-based dermatologist Dr. Andrea Suarez, who compared his behavior to blowing glue on TikTok. “Pressing your head will not change the shape of your eyes.”
In another clip from Wurzner’s video, oculoplastic surgeon Dr. Kami Parsa, who has a clinic in Beverly Hills, suggested it might change his eyes. Just not in the way intended. He claimed that prolonged skin tightening like the one shown in Würzner’s video may eventually require corrective work.
Let’s throw the Hippocratic Oath out the window for a moment. A cynical person could argue that, for a plastic surgeon, looking bulky is bad for business. After all, the DIY approach to anything has only benefited hardware stores. But plastic surgeons aren’t the only ones sounding the alarm. Child psychologists, medical schools, and countless doctors who have no investment in aesthetics or social media have spoken out against this. Men’s health non-profit Movember surveyed more than 3,000 men between the ages of 16 and 25 from the US, UK and Australia, and found that nearly two-thirds of them regularly interacted with masculinity influencers.
Yoon, whose first foray into commentary was through his now-defunct blog celebcosmeticsurgery.com, devotes only a portion of his social media output to celebrities or those with the look. But his rationale for speculating about some public figures’ elective procedures is no different than why he gets so angry about looking big. “It’s important for the general public to realize that some celebrities don’t look naturally great, even though they may tell you they drink a lot of water,” Yoon says. “It’s always harmful when people have unrealistic expectations about what they’re supposed to look like.”
There have been reports of an uptick in self-inflicted hammer wounds since lookmaxxing introduced the idea into the digital ether. But as mainstream coverage of lookmaxxing continues and the fashion establishment takes on people like Clavcular, professionals across the beauty ecosystem still feel uneasy.
Melinda Farina, a prominent figure in the beauty industry, runs Beauty Brokers Inc. Her consulting company, which says it works with 10,000 clients a year (some of whom are celebrities), matches potential patients with plastic surgeons based on their budgets and the type of procedures they are looking for. She bemoans doctors who use social media to speculate about actresses and actors. “They are cries of despair,” she says.
But lookmaxxing seems to worry Farina as much as the doctors they are now trying to discredit: “Whenever safety is questioned, then doctors should speak up.” “Let’s talk about this and not what celebrities do.”
This story appears in the July 2026 issue of The Hollywood Reporter entitled “The New Face of Hollywood.” Click here to read more.
