A Religious Look at Looksmaxxing - Why It's NOT Fine

In recent time a new dangerous and wrongful trend has emerged from social media and it is called looksmaxxing.

It revolves around "maximizing" one's own physical attractiveness via different and often dangerous methods.

One such method is braking the bones of one's face with a hammer or another tool with the intention to eventually modify one's facial features.

In this article we will focus on this practice specifically, as it already involves braking of several religious Laws and the several related topics.

Harming oneself

Here we can see an obvious form of self-harm in the form of braking one's own bones.

The great Jewish religious scholars eqate harming oneself to harming another person. Therefore when someone harms themselves they brake the Commandment to not harm others given to us in Leviticus 19:18.

No one expressed it as directly as the Rambam:

It is forbidden for person to injure anyone, neither his own self or another person.

Vanity

The other major element of the wrongness of looksmaxxing is the extreme amount of vanity involved in it. And, as we read in the Book of Ecclesiastes (Kohelet), vanity is simply pointless, therefore the extreme persuit of certain type of appearance for the sake of vanity is also pointless.

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.

(Ecclesiastes 2:11)

These things said, we can finish this article with the conclusion that looksmaxxing is wrong, dangerous, and utterly pointless.