Explaining Clavicular

Clavicular is a 20 year old streamer who all-ined on hardmaxxing, which includes:

• Starting testosterone at 14. Current steroid stack: anavar, test

• Starting HGH at 16, and is still taking it after his last meal.

• Starting Masterone at 17, unclear if still uses.

• Weightlifting, but no cardio.

• Bonesmashing.

• Mewing.

• Supplements: meldonium (neuroprotection), glutathion, NAC, melatonin (300-500mg megadose), hCG (250 units, twice per week, for fertility), pregabalin (anxiety), alprazilam, minoxidil, dutasteride, melanotan II (tanning, sexual function), retatrudide (appetite suppression), BPC-157 (cardioprotection, recovery), carotenoid blend (undertone, antioxidant), ketamine, isotretinoin (collagen production), noopept, alpha gbc, cerebralin, mexidol, semax (nasal), caffeine (forgot to add this) and adderall

• Posting 3,348 times on the looksmax forum as of Jan 18 2026. He created his account in Aug 2023 — so about 4 posts per day.

Through these methods, he’s managed to physically transform himself from an average guy to being in the top .1% of attractiveness.

I’ve also heard he’s done more than that, but I listed the interventions and factors that I think are the most interesting and important.

Clavicular’s popularity both organic and intense. There is no institution or influencer who tried to jack this guy up, and he became incredibly popular (Wikipedia page + 1.1M followers on tiktok/twitter/kick/instagram) at the age of 20, and in under a year. He’s banned from instagram and youtube.

That, on its own merit, is extreme, but it does speak to something deeper about our current culture. Particularly, massive market for contrarian biohacking and dating content on the internet. Some people have argued that this is because the modern worldview on dating is too bluepilled and needs to be replaced with something else, but I don’t think that’s true. There is no modern worldview on dating.

I don’t believe in the bluepill. My parents (progressive mother, grill conservative father) don’t. I don’t even think my adult siblings (all progressives) do.

I actually don’t think modern culture is cohesive, and I don’t know if it has ever been. For every piece of common advice, there is an opposing one: “better safe than sorry” contradicting “you only live once ; “don’t rock the boat” contradicting “be yourself”. If you ask random people on the street about how much looks matter in dating, you will get a lot of different answers.

A different way to look at it: there is a social taboo around looks. Part of this is that there is a taboo around hierarchy, and the idea that some people are “better looking” than others is just inherently uncomfortable. The other thing is that people’s preferences for attractive people manifest in unconscious and unreasonable ways, so exposing that looks matter is covertly misanthropic. The attractiveness question also fights against our moral intuitions regarding who gets to succeed and why. Whenever there is a taboo around anything, our stated beliefs start to go a little haywire, and because of that, discourse is impaired.

Next, we have his philosophy. Basically, he thinks that looks trump everything in dating, including race, status, and money. He thinks that looks matter in life beyond dating because of the halo effect, where people make judgements about others regarding their hobbies, actions, and words, and then those judgements are coloured by appearance.

Clavicular thinks that about 70% of the benefit of looksmaxxing can be extracted from “softmaxxing” — wearing good clothes, eating properly, going to the gym, and using normal products (e.g. retinol, creatine, etc). He then defends “hardmaxxing” on the grounds that the extra 30% does not take that much time out of your life — it doesn’t take that much time to get surgeries, use steroids, peptides, or take tretinoin.

My objection is that even if it isn’t difficult and timeconsuming to take 20 different supplements every day and get a surgery a year, it definitely is time consuming to put in the time and effort into researching all of those things. He also says he spends 50-80k (!!!) on hardmaxxing a year, which is definitely an investment, though I guess you could say that he is only doing that because he can afford it.

The other thing about hardmaxxing, is that the returns to looks are nonlinear. Going from the 5th to 90th percentile is more or less constant in terms of impact, but going from the 90th to 99th percentile is a 3x jump in terms of messages/week. So putting in the extra 30% to go from the 90th to 99th percentile might just be worth it¹.

source: dataclysm, OKCupid data

Some have argued that Clavicular is an example of embodied philosophy, where he is showing that looks trump everything by becoming attractive and getting tons of attention. I think this is only partially true; clavicular actually does have talent beyond his appearance. It takes a lot of effort and energy to start looksmaxxing that young and that intensively. If you listen to him speak, it’s clear he’s >110 IQ and knows a lot about human biology.

Clavicular himself doesn’t even seem to think he is popular just because of his looks, when asked, he brought up authenticity as a factor. Which is not the way I would model him, but in a way, yes, clavicular is authentic, insomuch as he is who he says he is and his appearance. It also makes a lot more sense to listen to what an attractive guy has to say about looksmaxxing, especially one that used to be a merely average guy. Clavicular’s body and experience is his proof of work.

People have often debated whether he is an “incel” or “blackpill” adjacent. I don’t think there is really a right answer to that question, because those words don’t really mean anything anymore. I would peg clavicular as somebody who believes in a kind of cosmic determinism combined with a belief in radical self-transformation, which on the surface seems contradictory, but is not on a deeper level.

Clavicular is mostly a looksmaxxing guy, but he does talk about dating occassionally, usually from a redpill perspective. Generally, I think the redpill is wrong: there is no growing monopolisation of women by the top x% of guys; the incel pandemic is real, but exaggerated, and doesn’t generalise outside of the United States; hypergamy² is a meme; personality does matter; women are not evil; frame is not everything; and “alpha fux beta bux” is also dumb and wrong.

It’s also interesting that, despite not having any overt political beliefs on stuff like taxes, abortion, or whatever, it’s very obvious that clavicular is “right wing”. All of the people who are interested in him are either podcast bros, apolitical normies, or people on the fringe right. I think this is because his values and philosophy are extremely hierarchical and masculine³, focusing on what society is and adapting you and your immediate surroundings to it.

Socially, he seems to hang out with whoever is interested in whoever is interested in him and accepts him, which is also true for most people. It just so happens that some of those said people — Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Myron — are… Maybe not so great.

My thoughts on his philosophy

In dating, I do think that looks trump everything — if you want access to more attractive people. The correlation in attractiveness between partners is about .5, while the correlation between a man’s income and the attractiveness of his wife is .12; the correlation between a man’s height and the attractiveness of his girlfriend is also .12. As such, looksmaxxing is about 3-4x more effective than optimising for height or income when it comes to attracting attractive women.

If you are talking about access to more people, the elephant in the room is extraversion and personality, which correlates with # of sexual partners more than either height or attractiveness (which have very weak correlations with # of sexual partners).

The thing is that success in relationships isn’t really about having access to more people, or even more attractive people. I think measuring it is actually very simple. Ask:

1. When you are with your partner, do you feel better or worse than you are when you are alone?

2. Are you choosing this relationship or just accepting it?

3. If you are choosing this relationship, are you still on the hunt for something better anyway?

Getting to a point where you can give the “right answers” to these questions is… Difficult. Is the answer metacogntion? Intelligence? Circumstances? Personality? Looks? Some combination of all these factors? I am not even in a relationship at all, so I can’t speak from a personal perspective. But my intuition is that being attractive is not the end-all be-all in terms of relationships.

Interestingly, if we look at data on online dating, it seems like response rates to men are strongly downstream of looks, but people’s subjective assessments of their dates do not depend on whether their date is more or less attractive than they are. The same is true for men⁴.

source: dataclysm

Clavicular is often asked why he doesn’t try jestermaxxing or charismamaxxing, and he is very dismissive of this. And I think he is right to be. It’s not that these aren’t important things, it’s that these are things that are much harder to work on directly. Partly because they are highly dependent on genes, but also on personal development, knowledge of humanity, and metacognition. You can’t just “work out” your charisma the way you can work out your body; the closest there is to that is working at a restaurant or trying to find and join friend groups.

When it comes to other aspects of life where your physical body is involved, I think it depends. The more success is dependent on public and initial approval, the more looks matter; the more success is dependent on a legible and valuable skillset, the less looks matter. For example, I would rank the following endeavours in terms of looks-focus:

1. Modelling

2. Acting

3. Singing

4. General online influencing

5. Politics

6. Video content (hot take — I don’t think streaming/youtube/etc is that looks-based)

7. Public speaking

8. Management

9. Sports

10. Religion, philosophy, or academia

11. Technical and manual work (close to 0)

The only area where I would really say looks trump everything is modelling. I don’t even think it is true for acting, and it definitely isn’t for singing. So I don’t think that looks actually matter that much for economic success, especially since 95+% of the human population is doing either 8 (management) or 11 (manual/technical work). Quantitatively, the correlation between looks and income is very low.

If we are talking about his stack, I object to the stimulant use. I don’t think stimulants are effective neurotropics and they work by giving you energy in the short term and taking it from you in the long term. Otherwise most of the stuff here is pretty effective, though think it is a little extreme and I’m not personally interested in a lot of it.

My specific thoughts on what he uses:

• Works: retatrudide, weightlifting, HGH, minoxidil

• Works, but am wary: isotretinoin, dutasteride, steroids, stimulants

• Probably works: BPC-157, carotenoid blend, melanotan II

• No opinion: semax, mexidol, cerebralin, alpha gbc, noopept, ketamine, alprazilam, pregabalin, NAC, glutathion

• No personal opinion, but sounds extreme: melatonin megadosing

• Probably doesn’t work: bonesmashing, mewing

1. This seems to be true for facebook friends too, but not to the same extent:

2. This word doesn’t mean anything.

3. Traditionally, focus on appearance has traditionally been a feminine thing, and people often try to insult manosphere or looksmaxxing guys by pointing that out. But it never really sticks, because that old culture where women do women things and men do men things doesn’t exist anymore. In fact, hardmaxxing is obviously a very masculine thing — diving into esoteric and experimental science to boost your appearance in unintuitive, effortful, or risky ways.

4. Chart: