Looksmaxxing With a Mouthguard: What Actually Works vs What's a Waste of Money
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The looksmaxxing community has collectively figured out something important: facial structure is more malleable than doctors and dentists have ever admitted, and the tools to change it are more accessible than surgery.
That part they got right.
Where things get murkier is in the methods. There are dozens of techniques floating around — mewing, thumbpulling, intraoral face pulling, jawliners, chewing gum, various tongue exercises, face pulling masks — each with its own community of believers, influencers, and before-and-after photos. And most people trying these methods are doing them in isolation, without understanding the underlying physics that determines whether any of them will actually work.
I've been in this game for over a decade. Not as a looksmaxxer — I got pulled into it because a dentist destroyed my structure and I spent years figuring out how to fix it. But the mechanism I discovered is the same one driving real results in the looksmaxxing world. And I can tell you with a lot of confidence what works, what's mostly a waste of time, and why.
The Underlying Physics: What You're Actually Trying to Do
Before running through any specific method, you need a framework. Because every looksmaxxing technique is attempting to do the same thing — whether its practitioners understand it or not.
Your skull is covered by soft tissue: fascia, connective tissue, muscle. This tissue acts like a balloon. When the back teeth provide adequate vertical height and maintain a healthy natural arc (called the Curve of Spee), that soft tissue stays inflated. The skull holds its correct shape — wide arches, pronounced cheekbones, good side profile, symmetric facial proportions.
When that vertical support is lost — from grinding, extractions, braces, or just the accumulated compression of years — the soft tissue deflates. The skull compresses inward. Facial dimension narrows. The side profile weakens. Asymmetries deepen.
What the looksmaxxing community calls "forward growth" is really just skull inflation — the cranial bones returning to their correct positions as the soft tissue expands. The maxilla doesn't grow forward in isolation. The entire skull re-inflates outward into symmetry. That's the mechanism. And that's the lens through which you need to evaluate every method.
The question to ask about any technique is simply: does it meaningfully improve the Curve of Spee? If yes, it has structural value. If no, it's at best a muscle-building exercise with no lasting architectural effect.
Mewing: Real Mechanism, Critical Flaw
Mewing is probably the most widely practiced looksmaxxing technique and it's the one I have the most respect for — up to a point.
The tongue exerts around five newtons of force, while it only takes one to two newtons to move a tooth. So the tongue genuinely has the mechanical power to influence arch width and position. And mewing does create real soft tissue stretch. When done consistently, it does improve the Curve of Spee measurably.
I know this because I tested it directly. I spent years using a tracking splint — a flat plane lower splint with occlusal paper — to measure how my contact points changed with different exercises. Mewing moved the needle.
But here's the problem that the mewing community has never addressed: whatever gains you create during the day, you lose overnight if you're not wearing a mouthguard.
When mewing lifts the upper arch, it creates a small posterior open bite — a gap between the back teeth. That gap is structural progress. But the moment you fall asleep without anything supporting that gap, thousands of jaw closures across a single night find the old locked tooth position, the gap closes, and the Curve flattens back out.
By morning you've reset. You mew again the next day, recover the same ground, go to sleep, reset again. Hamster wheel.
The mewers who do see genuine, lasting results are almost certainly already wearing some kind of nighttime appliance — an old retainer, a Myobrace, something — and they don't realize it's the variable making the difference.
Verdict: Real mechanism. Largely wasted without nighttime structural support.
Thumbpulling / Intraoral Face Pulling: Works a Little, Regresses the Same Way
Thumbpulling has become the next thing after mewing — you put your thumbs against the upper palate and apply outward pressure, theoretically mobilizing the cranial sutures and widening the palate.
I did this extensively back in 2015–17, spending hours at it. I also tested its impact on my tracking splint.
It does something. The soft tissue stretch is real, and it does slightly improve the Curve of Spee. I understand why people are doing it.
But the effect is weaker than mewing, and it has the exact same regression problem. You create a small posterior open bite with the pulling, you go to sleep without a mouthguard, and the progress evaporates overnight.
And it's not moving bones directly, despite the theory behind it. The soft tissue will pull any bone you've manually mobilized right back where it was. Everything in this game operates through soft tissue — you cannot win by going around it.
The comparison I'd make: thumbpulling is like trying to widen a doorframe by pushing outward on it with your hands. You can hold it open while you're there. But let go and it goes back.
Verdict: Minor structural effect. Same hamster wheel as mewing. Not efficient.
Jawliners and Chewing Gum: Building Muscle Is Not Structural Change
These products and the "chewing hard things" approach are premised on the idea that a strong jaw equals a better jaw. Bigger masseter muscles, more defined jawline, more chiseled look.
Here's the honest assessment: you might build some masseter muscle and that will give you a marginally more defined lower face in the short term. But you are not changing the architecture of the skull.
Muscle is not bone. A bigger masseter does not move the maxilla. It does not improve the Curve of Spee. It does not inflate the soft tissue and reposition the cranial bones. You can chew mastic gum for five years and have a great jaw muscle while your skull continues to compress and your side profile continues to weaken.
Worse, aggressive chewing on a structurally compromised bite can increase clenching forces and actually accelerate dental wear — which flattens the Curve further and makes the underlying problem worse.
I never see this nuance discussed in the jawliner content. It's a muscle-building product being marketed as a structural solution. Those are very different things.
Verdict: Builds masseter muscle. Zero architectural structural change. Potentially counterproductive for a compromised bite.
Facelifts and Cosmetic Surgery: An Illusion That Ages Badly
I want to address this briefly because some people in the looksmaxxing world eventually consider more drastic options.
Facelifts work by lifting and repositioning the soft tissue of the face — trying to recreate the upward positioning of the maxilla and cheekbones that comes naturally from proper structure. The best plastic surgeons understand that moving the maxilla area is the key to transforming a face from average to striking.
The problem is that it's structurally unstable. You're not addressing the underlying deflation of the skull — you're artificially repositioning tissue on top of a structure that continues to compress. Within five to ten years, most facelift patients look noticeably worse than before the procedure, because the underlying structural collapse has continued while the surface tissue was pulled into an unnatural position.
You also cannot surgically move the maxilla in isolation. It's connected to approximately twenty-two other skull bones like a puzzle piece. Move one without moving the others and you get an unnatural result.
Real structural restoration means the entire skull inflates and all the bones reposition together. Surgery physically cannot replicate that.
Verdict: Temporary cosmetic improvement over an unaddressed structural problem. Often looks significantly worse within a decade.
A Mouthguard: The Piece Everyone Is Missing
Here's where the looksmaxxing community has a massive blind spot.
A rubber mouthguard worn at night — one that adds vertical height between the back teeth while keeping the occlusion unlocked — is the single most structurally impactful thing most looksmaxxers could add to their routine.
It works by doing what all the other techniques are trying to do, but persistently and passively. It adds height between the back teeth, which prevents the jaw from fully closing and forces the soft tissue of the skull to stretch overnight. That stretch, sustained for hours every night, is what begins to re-inflate the skull and shift the cranial bones back toward correct position.
Critically, it also solves the regression problem that kills results from mewing and thumbpulling. Wear the mouthguard at night and the posterior open bite your daytime exercises create gets supported rather than closed out. Your gains carry forward. Progress compounds.
I tested this directly with my tracking splint. When I wore an appliance at night, the structural improvements from mewing didn't reverse by morning. Instead I was building from a slightly better position every day. Over months, that compounding is enormous compared to the endless reset cycle without it.
The combination of a nighttime mouthguard plus mewing or body stretching is significantly faster than either alone. The mouthguard holds the structural gains. The active exercises add additional stretch on top. Each day you're building on the last.
And here's a detail that matters: it needs to be an unlocked occlusion. A mouthguard that locks the jaw into a specific position will plateau your progress, because as your structure improves, the jaw needs to be free to find its correct anatomical position naturally. Lock it down and you're capping your own ceiling.
RevivOne is $25. Compare that to the hundreds people spend on jawliners, mastic gum subscriptions, thumbpulling courses, and everything else — much of which is producing no lasting structural change whatsoever.
Verdict: The highest-leverage structural intervention in looksmaxxing. Holds gains from other methods, drives independent structural improvement, and compounds over time.
The Honest Hierarchy
If I had to rank looksmaxxing methods by their actual structural impact, from highest to lowest, it looks like this:
Nighttime mouthguard (unlocked occlusion) — highest-leverage, passive, works while you sleep, solves regression from all other methods.
Mewing + mouthguard — genuine compounding effect; mewing alone plateaus and regresses, but combined with a mouthguard it builds.
Body stretching + mouthguard — surprisingly powerful because the jaw and body are a connected system; flexibility in the body reflects in the jaw. Stretching tight areas while wearing a mouthguard can accelerate skull inflation significantly.
Thumbpulling / intraoral pulling + mouthguard — minor effect, but at least the gains are preserved if you wear a mouthguard after.
Mewing alone — real mechanism, but mostly hamster wheel without overnight support.
Thumbpulling alone — weaker effect, same regression problem.
Jawliners / chewing gum — muscle building, not structural. No lasting architectural change.
Surgery — temporary cosmetic effect over unaddressed structural collapse. Often looks worse in the medium term.
What to Actually Do
If you're serious about structural facial improvement, the foundation is straightforward: wear a mouthguard at night that adds vertical height with an unlocked occlusion. Let that work consistently. Add mewing or body stretching on top to compound the effect.
Stop spending money on products that build jaw muscle while your skull continues to compress. The jaw muscle isn't your problem. The soft tissue of your skull is.
This process is slow. Structural change takes time, and anyone promising dramatic results in a few weeks from any method is selling you something. Real skull remodeling happens over months and years. But with the right foundation — the nighttime mouthguard — at least every day is building on the last rather than resetting.
The looksmaxxing community has the right instincts. They're just missing the piece that makes all the other pieces work.
RevivOne is an occlusal guard designed to help reduce bruxism (teeth grinding) and jaw tension during sleep. Individual results vary. The observations and community patterns described in this article reflect the founder's personal experience and reports from community members, and are not intended as medical advice.