Clavicular is six-foot-two (1.88 metres tall), weighs 180 pounds (82kg) and has a 31-inch waist. His biacromial width – basically the span of the clavicle, from which the 20-year-old streamer gets his name – is 19.5 inches.
He has a midface ratio, which is derived by dividing the distance from the pupil to the mouth by the distance between the pupils, of 1.07. His chin to philtrum ratio is 2.6.
According to Clavicular, these calculations make him handsome. Just not as handsome as actor Matt Bomer.
Clavicular is a looksmaxxer, the first star from an online community that holds male attractiveness as the key to worldly achievement.
He considers Bomer to possess the most harmonious man’s face in existence, beyond even his own. That’s where the bimaxillary osteotomy, also known as double jaw surgery, comes in.
The streamer wants one.
Because, like all looksmaxxers, he believes any step toward increasing his beauty to be virtuous.
Read more: Six-pack abs, nice skin, full head of hair? How men fret about their looks too
But it’s a certain kind of beauty. The looksmaxxing community prefers people who look like Bomer: lantern-jawed, symmetrical, white (a Black man who attempted to make looksmaxxing content was racially harassed, Wired reported last year).
Clavicular dismisses concerns that the subculture is racist as “dumb”.
Since the age of 14, Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, has injected and ingested dozens of controlled substances to “ascend” – looksmaxxer lingo for becoming more handsome. He has a single goal in mind, and his philosophy requires him to get there as fast as possible.
If most people regard self-improvement as a pleasant hike to a more attractive destination, Clavicular’s version of it resembles a grim speed test on a salt flat.
Clavicular’s extreme methods, bizarre argot and nihilistic worldview, in which the universe is a Darwinian nightclub full of aggressive men jockeying for status, have in recent months made him a social media sensation.
Uncanny clips of him “mogging” other men – that is, standing next to them and making them look common by comparison – and mercilessly appraising women’s looks have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram.
Videos of Clavicular have become so ubiquitous on the social platform X that its head of product recently threatened, jokingly, that he would shut down the site if he saw one more.
By any definition of internet celebrity in 2026, he has ascended.
And yet, padding around his Airbnb on a recent morning in Tempe, Arizona – where he had been streaming in the vicinity of Arizona State University, renowned among his set for its licentious coeds – Clavicular seemed a bit worse for wear.
He had slept only three hours the previous night.
“I was slaymaxxing,” he said: having sexual intercourse.
Clavicular was preparing to stream, which he does most days for upward of eight hours. He’s especially known for “IRL” streaming: going out in public and interacting with strangers in an attempt to create viral moments that can be clipped and distributed over social media.
He makes more than US$100,000 (approximately RM390,900) a month from Kick, his preferred streaming service.
Clavicular may have introduced looksmaxxing to popular culture, but he still seemed to be working out whom, exactly, it was all for.
The young men of the very online right have claimed Clavicular as their own. And he has given them good reason to do so – just last month, he partied at a Miami nightclub with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist commentator, and influencer Andrew Tate – who faces charges of rape and human trafficking – producing a kind of manosphere cloutbomb.
This despite Clavicular, months earlier, criticising Tate’s appearance: “Not a good-looking guy by any means.”
In videos that spread widely online, the three men were seen chanting along to the Ye (Kanye West) track Heil Hitler.
But Clavicular seems as much as anything a calculating product of a hyperactive digital culture that rewards the violation of taboo. And he’s adamant that the only cause he truly cares about is his own.
During a discussion of potential 2028 US presidential candidates on a recent episode of the conservative podcast The Michael Knowles Show, Clavicular said he would vote for governor Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, over vice president JD Vance because he preferred Newsom’s looks to Vance’s.
“It wasn’t, like, a political statement at all,” Clavicular said later of his criticism of Vance. “I was just saying he’s fat.”
Clavicular grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, the son of a businessperson and a stay-at-home mother.
He didn’t like high school, where he had a tough time with social cues and small talk (though Clavicular has never been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, he frequently refers to himself as an “autist” and calls his way of seeing the world a “gift”).
And he didn’t like the way he looked, which he wanted to change, fast. Shortly before his 15th birthday, he ordered testosterone off the internet.
“It’s like a cheat code,” he remembered thinking. “Why would I not do this?”
When his parents found his stash, they threw it away, sending Clavicular into a hormonal tailspin. He began to order his supplies to a post office box – steroids, fat dissolvers, biodegradable sutures.
Eventually, he said, his parents gave up.
“They realised that there was kind of nothing that they could do to stop my ascension,” he said.
He became a frequent poster on one looksmaxxing online forum, where he mastered the sensibility – a mix of 4chan slang, grievances about the unfair biological advantages held by tall and muscular men and a touch of vulnerability, as teen boys asked other posters to rate their attractiveness as harshly as possible.
In long posts filled with scientific terminology, Clavicular discussed his journey. He spent hours adjusting his image in Photoshop to see what he might look like after surgeries to push forward his upper jaw and lengthen his legs.
Sometimes, he took meth to suppress his appetite.
In the fall of 2024, Clavicular started at Sacred Heart University, a small Catholic school in Connecticut.
According to Clavicular, several weeks into his freshman year, he came home from class to discover campus police officers turning his room upside down. As he tells it, trolls on the looksmaxxing forum had called the school to tell officials that Clavicular had steroids in his dorm, and he was expelled.
Out of school, he took a restaurant job, lowering him to the status of what he called a “wagecuck”: someone who works for a living.
In his spare time, he posted videos on TikTok and started his own stream, rating other people’s looks.
Today, 10,000 people regularly watch Clavicular’s stream concurrently, some of whom are paid by Kick to clip short videos.
In December, footage surfaced of Clavicular pointing a gun at a car of strangers who had tracked him down to what was then his residence in Miami. Also that month, Clavicular appeared to run over a man who had leaped, phone in hand and raving, onto the hood of his Cybertruck.
With incidents like these in mind, Clavicular recently moved into a condo owned by his friend, streamer Adin Ross.
Guns, drugs, misogyny, body dysmorphia – the miasma of nihilism swirling around Clavicular has made him an irresistible symbol of social decline, a freakish avatar for the hopelessly fallen, social-media-addled state of the young American man.
Read more: What is 'looksmaxxing' and why is this male beauty trend controversial?
This month, Clavicular had promised to host a party at the Varsity Tavern, a multistory club in downtown Tempe.
But around 11pm, word began to spread in the bar that Clavicular had been arrested.
Mitchell Jackson, his publicist, took a hurried phone call to confirm: The Scottsdale police had taken his client into custody, and would go on to charge him with two felonies, possession of a forged instrument and possession/use of a dangerous drug. A judge forbade him to leave the state.
The streamer had been arrested for being inside a Scottsdale bar underage with a fake ID.
When police searched him, the officers found two pills: an Adderall pill and an oral steroid. The police report mentioned that the manager of the bar had told police that he had received special dispensation to have Clavicular there as a 20-year-old.
The next day, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute based on what it called “no reasonable likelihood of conviction”. Clavicular was free.
Which was fortunate, because he had plans. On Thursday night that week, he walked in the New York Fashion Week show of Elena Velez, a designer known for her use of controversial internet microcelebrities as models (he held his phone on the runway).
Clavicular, characteristically, attributed his good luck with the criminal justice system to his looks.
“You just gotta mog,” he posted on X, above a screenshot of a news headline.
“Men’s facial features may sway criminal sentencing,” it read. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
