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The New Science Of Female Attraction - Psychology Roundtable - #1133
Where this was said
Does Looksmaxxing Give Women the Ick?
At 4:44 · chapter starts 3:14
Rob Henderson opens a fascinating case study around the looksmaxing influencer Clavicular, who reportedly became sterile after self-injection experiments and told The New York Times it was worth it. Henderson argues that women's attraction to Clavicular likely comes from his fame, not his looks — and that average men replicating his protocol would trigger perceptions of vanity and narcissism. Macken Murphy reveals that looksmax.org's first rule used to be 'don't talk about looksmaxing', reflecting an evolved intuition that cosmetic effort, once detected, devalues the signal. A Chinese study by Xia and colleagues supports this: plastic surgery boosted attractiveness ratings but attenuated dateability when men knew about it. The panel wrestles with whether this is cheater detection, personality inference, or simply that attraction evolved to respond to health signals rather than the underlying health itself.
Extreme looksmaxing may undermine attraction by signalling narcissism and short-term mating orientation. A Chinese study found knowing someone had plastic surgery attenuated their dateability even when attractiveness was boosted — because beauty evolved as a health and quality signal, and detected fakery degrades it.
