Gen Z Is Smashing Their Own Bones to Get Hired. And the Research Says They Might Be Right.

His name is Braden Peters. He's 20, earns six figures a month on livestreams, and his career advice includes smashing your own facial bones with a hammer. Absurd? Sure. But the economics data backing his premise is 30 years deep — and it should make every recruiter uncomfortable.

Read on. 👇

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Gen Z Is Smashing Their Own Bones to Get Hired. And the Research Says They Might Be Right.

Lookism is the hiring bias nobody trains for — because nobody wants to admit it exists.

Meet the $100K-a-Month Face

Braden Peters is 20 years old. Online, he goes by Clavicular. He's the most famous face in the "looksmaxxing" movement — a subculture of mostly young men obsessed with optimizing their physical appearance through extreme measures.

How extreme? Peters advocates "bone smashing" — literally hitting your own facial bones with a hammer to create micro-fractures that theoretically heal into a sharper jawline. He started injecting himself with hormones and steroids at 14. He sold a $50/month self-improvement course called "Clavicular's Clan." He walked at New York Fashion Week for designer Elena Velez. A November 2025 video of him injecting his 17-year-old girlfriend with fat-dissolving peptides went viral.

According to the New York Times, by February 2026, he was earning more than $100,000 a month from his Kick livestreams alone.

The instinct is to dismiss this as internet madness. Gen Z kids doing dangerous things for clout. But here's the uncomfortable part: the economics research suggests these kids understand something about the labor market that most HR departments refuse to acknowledge.

The Data Nobody in HR Wants to Talk About

In 1994, economists Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle published a landmark NBER paper on beauty and earnings. What they found has been replicated and expanded for three decades:

• Workers rated "below average" in attractiveness earn up to 15% less than average-looking peers — even after controlling for education, IQ, and occupation.
• The "ugliness penalty" is consistently larger than the beauty premium. Being unattractive hurts you more than being attractive helps you.
• A follow-up longitudinal study found that the attractiveness gap persists into workers' 50s. It doesn't fade. It compounds.

More recent experimental research puts a finer point on it. Researchers at MIT's J-PAL submitted identical resumes to employers in Argentina — some with attractive photos, some with unattractive photos. Resumes with attractive photos received 36% more callbacks. Attractive applicants also heard back 30% faster.

This isn't a fringe finding. It's one of the most replicated results in labor economics. And yet: when was the last time your company's unconscious bias training mentioned appearance?

The 30-Second Judgment Call

Here's where it gets real for recruiters.

LinkedIn's own data shows that 86% of recruiters and hiring managers spend 30 seconds or less on initial profile screenings. In that half-minute window, your headshot is doing most of the talking.

Profiles with professional photos receive 14x more views than profiles without. That means a candidate's access to a $150–$500 professional photographer is directly correlated with their visibility in the talent market.

Think about what that means. A brilliant engineer with a cropped group selfie as their LinkedIn photo gets 1/14th the recruiter attention of an equally qualified candidate with a studio headshot. Not because of skills. Not because of experience. Because of a photograph.

Now multiply that by every Zoom interview where a candidate's lighting, background, and camera quality become unconscious proxies for "professionalism." Every in-person meeting where height, weight, facial symmetry, and grooming trigger snap judgments that no structured interview rubric will ever capture.

Gen Z sees this. They grew up on camera. They know exactly how much appearance matters in a digital-first world. The looksmaxxing movement isn't irrational — it's a generation doing the math on a system that everyone else pretends is merit-based.

The Legal Gray Zone

Here's the part that should concern your legal team: in most of the United States, appearance-based discrimination is perfectly legal.

Federal law does not protect workers from discrimination based on attractiveness, height, or weight. Title VII covers race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. The ADA covers disabilities. Appearance? Not on the list.

Only a handful of jurisdictions have acted:

• Michigan's Elliott-Larsen Act explicitly prohibits discrimination based on height and weight.
• Washington, D.C.'s Human Rights Act goes further, banning discrimination based on "personal appearance."
• New York City added height and weight as protected classes in November 2023 — the most significant recent move.

That's it. In the vast majority of the country, an employer can legally decline to hire someone because they don't look the part. Abercrombie & Fitch built an entire brand strategy on this for years — and it was lawful until the discrimination intersected with race and religion.

For recruiters, this creates a strange reality: you're trained to avoid bias around dozens of categories, but the one that may have the largest measurable impact on hiring decisions — physical appearance — isn't even on your radar.

AI Was Supposed to Fix This. It Made It Worse.

The promise of AI-powered hiring was objectivity. Remove the human. Remove the bias. Let the algorithm decide.

The reality? A 2024 University of Washington study found that large language models used in resume screening favored white-associated names in 85.1% of cases and female-associated names in only 11.1% of cases. Black males were disadvantaged in up to 100% of cases.

And it gets worse when video enters the picture. An October 2024 survey found that roughly 7 in 10 companies allow AI tools to reject candidates without any human oversight. When those tools process video interviews, they're ingesting facial expressions, lighting quality, background environments — all the visual signals that serve as proxies for attractiveness and socioeconomic status.

HireVue, one of the largest AI interview platforms, faced enough scrutiny over its facial analysis features that it dropped them entirely in 2021. But the underlying problem hasn't gone away. Every AI model trained on human hiring data inherits the beauty bias baked into three decades of human decisions.

We didn't remove the bias. We automated it.

The DEI Blind Spot

Here's the stat that should haunt every Chief People Officer: a 2025 McGill study found that HR leaders rate their DEI efforts at 97% effective — while employees rate them at 37%.

That 60-point gap is where lookism lives.

Most DEI programs train for race, gender, age, disability, and sexual orientation. Important categories, all of them. But virtually none address appearance — despite the fact that the beauty premium is one of the largest and most persistent wage gaps in the economics literature.

Why? Because appearance bias feels too subjective. Too uncomfortable. Too close to "well, that's just human nature." So we ignore it. We train hiring managers to avoid saying "culture fit" as code for race, but we don't train them to notice when "executive presence" is code for "tall, attractive, and well-dressed."

Meanwhile, a generation of young workers is watching a 20-year-old make $100K a month teaching people to literally reshape their bones — and concluding, not unreasonably, that the system rewards looks more than it rewards merit.

What Recruiters Should Actually Do About This

1. Audit your own data. Run a correlation between interview scores and candidate photos across your last 500 hires. If you find a pattern — and you will — you have a problem to solve, not ignore.

2. Add appearance to your bias training. If you train for gender, race, and age bias, there's no intellectually honest reason to leave out the bias with the largest documented wage gap.

3. Reconsider photo requirements. If your ATS, sourcing tool, or LinkedIn workflow makes photos a de facto screening input, you're baking lookism into your funnel. Some European countries have moved toward anonymous applications. There's a reason.

4. Standardize video interviews ruthlessly. Same questions. Same scoring rubric. Evaluate with audio-only first if you can. The more visual information your evaluators process, the more appearance bias creeps in.

5. Watch the legal landscape. New York City's 2023 law is a signal, not an outlier. As the research becomes more mainstream and Gen Z enters management, expect more jurisdictions to follow. The companies that get ahead of this won't be the ones scrambling to comply — they'll be the ones who already built a fairer process.

The Bottom Line

A kid on the internet is making six figures teaching teenagers to hit themselves in the face with a hammer. It's easy to mock. It's harder to reckon with the fact that the labor market data validates the underlying premise: how you look meaningfully determines how much you earn, how fast you get hired, and how far you advance.

Every recruiter reading this has made a snap judgment based on a candidate's appearance. Not out of malice — out of biology, out of culture, out of a system that never asked them to examine it.

Looksmaxxing is Gen Z's answer to a problem that HR won't name. The question is whether the industry will keep pretending the bias doesn't exist — or finally train for the one that actually shows up in the data.

The HR Blotter

AI’s Real Promise: Fewer Work Hours, Not Fewer Jobs - AI may slash working hours rather than jobs, reframing fears of mass unemployment as a future of expanded leisure if productivity gains are shared wisely. Economist Alex Tabarrok argues history supports this optimism, but warns that without policy or cultural shifts, companies may hoard efficiency gains instead of shortening the workweek. The real question isn’t whether AI reduces labor—it’s who benefits from the dividend.

Supreme Court Case Threatens Lifeline of America’s Elder Care Workforce - Nursing homes warn that deporting Haitian immigrants could devastate an already fragile elder-care workforce, as the Supreme Court weighs the Trump administration’s bid to revoke their temporary protected status. Haitians play a critical role in long-term care, and industry leaders argue their removal would worsen staffing shortages and disrupt continuity of care for vulnerable seniors. The case highlights how immigration policy directly shapes America’s capacity to care for its aging population.

Side Hustles Surge in 2026 as Workers Chase Job Security - Side hustles have become a financial necessity in 2026, driven largely by job insecurity and economic uncertainty. A Careerminds survey found that most workers use secondary income streams as “career insurance,” though the added workload often increases stress and burnout. The findings highlight a modern workforce trading free time for stability while seeking greater employer support to reduce reliance on extra work.

AI Is Gutting the Junior Developer Pipeline, Microsoft Warns - AI-powered coding tools are accelerating productivity but discouraging companies from hiring junior developers, threatening the future talent pipeline. Microsoft leaders warn that sidelining entry-level engineers risks long-term innovation and governance, as data shows a sharp decline in junior hiring since ChatGPT’s launch. Their proposed solution—a structured preceptorship model—aims to pair juniors with senior mentors to preserve expertise in an AI-driven era.

The Dark Side of LinkedIn: When Networking Becomes Harvesting - Predatory “harvesting” on LinkedIn is turning networking into extraction, as bad actors mine engagement lists and connections for unsolicited outreach and lead generation. Career expert Wendi Weiner warns that these tactics erode trust and exploit visibility, urging professionals to prioritize intentional relationships over superficial growth. Protecting privacy settings and building authentic connections remain the strongest defenses against network exploitation.

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The Jim Stroud Podcast

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You're panicking about the wrong thing. AI isn't the biggest threat to the job market. There is something much worse. Tune in to find out what it is.

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One more thing before I go…

I’m hanging out at the SHRM Talent 2026 Conference this week in Dallas, TX. If you’re there too maybe we can hang out, network, do lunch. DM me on LinkedIn.

Okay, 2 things…

Next month I’ll be at the Recruiting Innovation Summit? (May 5-6, 2026) If you miss me in Dallas, there’s still a chance to connect IRL in Atlanta. Just sayin’…

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