\n A couple of days prior to the suspected overdose, \u201c60 Minutes Australia\u201d released an interview that the influencer had walked out of after a few half-hearted attempts to insult his interviewer. Earlier this month, he appeared to start convulsing after encouraging another streamer, who calls himself \u201cthe Cuban Tarzan,\u201d to choke him. And less than 24 hours after his suspected overdose, at the opening of a club that\u2019s open three nights a week for five hours a night, he spent most of the time standing by himself on an elevated surface, scrolling on his phone while young women danced a few feet away.\n <\/p>\n
\n Is this what self-improvement looks like? Clavicular has presented himself as a short-term case study in the benefits of \u201clooksmaxxing,\u201d the art of modifying one\u2019s physical appearance to attract women, wealth and fame. Starting at age 14, by his account, through exercise, sometimes by a hammer to the face, and with the help of a regimen<\/a> of off-label or illicit drugs, he says he\u2019s made himself into something new: a 6-foot-2<\/a> Chad with a 31-inch waist and pointy clavicles that span 19.5 inches (his own measurements, provided<\/a> to the New York Times).\n <\/p>\n \n The result is an uncannily childlike face stuck onto a slim frame with swollen arms and a sharply tapering torso. (He rarely shows his legs.) His skin is always pallid, his expression pursed, his eyes vacant. He\u2019s almost always wearing, or removing, shirts that are too tight, so he can flaunt the broadness of his shoulders. He\u2019s been profiled in GQ and walked in New York Fashion Week; after spending a day with him, the Times declared, borrowing from looksmaxxing argot, that he\u2019d \u201cascended\u201d \u2014 in looksmaxxing vernacular \u2014 successfully became more attractive and widely known.\n <\/p>\n \n But collapsing in public and appearing to lose control of his own body doesn\u2019t match the image of a giga-Chad. Clavicular\u2019s project isn\u2019t playing out like an inspiring story of human potential or a replicable health fad, even as he says<\/a> \u201clooksmaxxing is just another form of self-improvement that\u2019s a little bit more holistic\u201d than working out.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI\u2019d say I\u2019ve pretty much tried it all,\u201d he told \u201c60 Minutes Australia\u201d of his own looksmaxxing methods. \u201cI haven\u2019t had plastic surgery, but just about everything else in terms of biohacking. So you can really do a lot for your looks with simple pharmaceutical intervention.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Onscreen, his is a performance predicated on extremity and shock, played out on his own body. Hundreds of thousands of people are watching.\n <\/p>\n \n Clavicular is less idealized young man than living experiment, appearing to risk his health for a fling with fame \u2013\u2013 much like freak show performers who turned themselves into spectacles. Sword swallowers, fire eaters and pain-proof specialists willingly subjected themselves to things that could hurt or kill them, as long as someone was watching.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cNo one performs a freak show for their own benefit,\u201d said Matt DiCintio, a freak show scholar. \u201cAre people looksmaxxing so they can look better for themselves? Would people looksmaxx and not document it? It\u2019s sort of similar to performing in popular entertainment \u2013\u2013 you don\u2019t do it for yourself.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n CNN gave a written request for comment to a source close to Clavicular, who agreed to relay it to Clavicular\u2019s lawyer. At the time of publication, Clavicular or his lawyer had not provided comment.\n <\/p>\n \n If Clavicular\u2019s apparent unraveling has turned off any aspiring Adonises who once idolized him, it\u2019s riveting thousands more: His follower count on Kick has nearly doubled<\/a> from what it was in early February, just before local police accused him of entering an Arizona bar underage with a fake ID. Authorities declined to charge him in that case, but he was arrested again in Florida in March, on a misdemeanor battery charge<\/a>, shortly after an unrelated incident wherein he shot at an alligator in a swamp. The law enforcement agencies involved in his misdemeanor arrest and the alligator shooting didn\u2019t immediately respond to CNN\u2019s requests for comment. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission said<\/a> in March it was investigating the incident; it\u2019s illegal to kill or attempt to kill an alligator in the state. TMZ reported that the alligator was already dead at the time of the shooting.\n <\/p>\n \n Among looksmaxxers, Clavicular is the most notorious for his extreme approach to beauty, positioning what looks like self-harm, like trying to physically reshape his bones, as \u201cself-care.\u201d Looksmaxxing grew out of forums for so-called incels<\/a> \u2014 involuntary celibates united in blaming women for their misery \u2014 among members seeking an alternative to a sexless life. If they weren\u2019t attracting women in their existing, unoptimized forms, then they\u2019d demand their attention by improving their physical attractiveness. It was a series of questions about incel culture and his connection to the self-proclaimed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate that led to his walking out on the \u201c60 Minutes\u201d segment.\n <\/p>\n \n Looksmaxxers who got internet-famous before Clavicular, like Kareem Shami, encouraged followers to \u201cmew,\u201d tucking their tongues in their mouths to better define their jawlines, or consider plastic surgery (\u201chardmaxxing<\/a>\u201d) to correct physical deficiencies. Clavicular, meanwhile, shared lurid, dangerous-sounding anecdotes of injecting himself with testosterone while he was still going through puberty and using methamphetamine to stay skinny. On early livestreams, he hit the bones in his face with a hammer, hoping they\u2019d grow sharper.\n <\/p>\n \n But dangerous acts can and do go wrong in front of an audience hungry for blood. The founding member of the Flying Wallendas, a family of stunt performers who performed often without safety nets, fell to his death at age 73 during a highwire walk that was broadcast on nationwide TV. Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy was mauled by a tiger during what became the duo\u2019s final show. DiCintio recalled, too, a husband-and-wife duo famous for appearing to catch bullets in their teeth, \u201cuntil one day they didn\u2019t\u201d due to a misfired gun.\n <\/p>\n \n Like carnies, looksmaxxers mostly associate with their own kind. They speak their own odd language that distinguishes members of the in-group and doesn\u2019t make a ton of sense to outsiders, attaching \u201c-maxx\u201d to the ends of words that function on their own. (\u201cShowermaxxing\u201d is just showering.) Looksmaxxers compete to \u201coutmog\u201d each other (to look hotter in side-by-side appearances). They attempt to avoid \u201ccortisol spikes,\u201d stressful or embarrassing moments on livestreams. Women who aren\u2019t attractive (or attracted) to them are \u201cfoids,\u201d a blend<\/a> of \u201cfemale\u201d and \u201chumanoid\u201d meant to offend. \u201cJester\u201d is a verb, noun and adjective; all are undesirable manifestations of a lack of serious commitment to the pursuit of maxxing. And like sideshow performers, looksmaxxers travel together and settle in the same places \u2013\u2013 for looksmaxxers, it\u2019s Miami.\n <\/p>\n \n But a few decades ago, California\u2019s Venice Beach was the destination for a type of proto-looksmaxxer. Outdoor fitness enthusiasts evolved into bodybuilders, who, like looksmaxxers, fixated on their bodies and adhered to a rigid, extreme interpretation of masculinity often achieved by using steroids and substances.\n <\/p>\n \n Massive musclemen were considered freakish for their extreme body modification, too, but their true, subconscious goal was to gain each other\u2019s approval, said bodybuilding historian John D. Fair. In gyms they found a place to gather in person. Based solely on his livestreams, Clavicular\u2019s circle appears to mostly hang out in his cavernous Miami apartment while he plays \u201ccrypto casino games\u201d on camera. They also make brief visits to clubs where the star is too young to drink.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cAlthough one of the reasons I started lifting was to impress women, I found that women constantly complained they were not impressed by big muscles, but men were,\u201d said Fair, a former bodybuilder.\n <\/p>\n \n Whatever connection looksmaxxers share is skin-deep. In looksmaxxing forums, young, unfamous people take turns asking each other what\u2019s wrong with them physically and how they recommend \u201cfixing\u201d those perceived flaws. Improving their physical appearances in theory should help improve their romantic prospects and even professional opportunities, said Kyle Ganson, assistant professor at the University of Toronto who\u2019s studying looksmaxxing. But looksmaxxers mostly define themselves by what other looksmaxxers think of them, which mainly happens online.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something about the need for looksmaxxers to be conspicuous to one another as opposed to something like a performer, who\u2019s doing it because it\u2019s their vocation,\u201d DiCintio said.\n <\/p>\n \n By his own metrics, Clavicular is a looksmaxxing success. He\u2019s surrounded by young, beautiful women and beefy men who seem more interested in his camera crew than Clavicular\u2019s dick jokes or speeches about testosterone cycles and facial harmony. He\u2019s told the New York Times that he suspects he\u2019s sterile after years of injecting himself with testosterone and alluded to not necessarily enjoying the act of sex. (And yet on a livestream this week, Clavicular joked about hosting a contest whose winner would become pregnant with his child; he said he doesn\u2019t plan to be an involved parent.) On the \u201cAdam Friedland Show,\u201d he said he lasts about one minute during intercourse. On a recent stream with a group of octogenarians, he confessed his lack of \u201cgame\u201d with women \u2013\u2013 \u201cwhen it comes to talking to girls, it\u2019s pretty brutal\u201d \u2013\u2013 and that he leverages his fame to get them into bed.\n <\/p>\n \n At last week\u2019s club opening, Clavicular, who said he was less than 24 hours sober, was still glued to his phone while the clubgoers danced. He was reading livestream comments and waiting for a text from his dad, whom he\u2019d invited<\/a> to the opening. His father didn\u2019t show before the livestream ended.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, the \u201clooksmaxxing\u201d livestreamer Clavicular collapsed as thousands watched. The 20-year-old self-styled master of looking good was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":628054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,51508,75],"class_list":["post-628053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-ctt","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/628054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Clavicular](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/still-22566160-47892-535-still.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/gettyimages-1756440667a.JPG\")
<\/p>\n![\"Finalists](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/gettyimages-3301609a.JPG\")
<\/p>\n