TikTok Myth of the Week: Breaking Bones Will Make You Beautiful

Welcome to another TikTok Myth of the Week that I really, really wish I could come up with. Today we’re talking about “bone crushing,” sometimes known by similar names like “bone crushing.” This is when you hit someone in the face with a hammer, but carefully. To make yourself more beautiful.

Bone breaking is not a new trend, although it has recently become more popular – or at least more popular to be warned against and ridiculed. This has been a topic of discussion on the saddest forums on Reddit for years now, with (mostly) teenage boys asking if that bone-crushing thing they saw on YouTube or Instagram is legit, and then, in many cases , they try it themselves.

What is bone crushing?

Crushing bones is supposed to make the bones in your face larger or thicker in the places where you crush them. People who are interested in breaking bones tap the face with a hammer or knuckles in areas where they need more bone structure, often the cheekbones and jawline.

The idea of ​​doing this to beautify your face seems to have sprung from the imaginations of influencers (more on what this phrase means in a minute). They heard about Wolff’s law , which describes how bone remodels based on physical stress, and took it to its logical conclusion.

Wolf’s Law is widely accepted by scientists as legitimate. It says that when you put stress on your bones, they become stronger in response. This is why people at risk of osteoporosis are advised to engage in activities such as walking or running. The Bone Crushers believe they can use this principle to grow facial bones.

Does Bone Breakdown Really Work?

There is absolutely no evidence that hitting your face with a hammer can give you a chiseled jaw and cheekbones. Wolf’s Law describes the general idea of ​​bone growth in response to stress, but the details of how it is triggered and how bones grow as a result are more complex than you can sum up in one TikTok-readable sentence. Proponents of bone crushing sometimes point to athletes or boxers who they believe have been affected by Wolf’s Law, such as this Insta post showing a tennis player with one forearm noticeably larger than the other. I’d venture to guess that he probably didn’t achieve his physique by smashing one arm with a hammer.

So what happens if you tap your facial bones several times with a hard object? You probably won’t experience any aesthetic bone growth, but you may well experience some swelling and bruising as the soft tissue of your face reacts to the hammer blow. There are videos of influencers saying they break bones, showing off bruises and swollen cheekbones. I think this is one way to enlarge parts of the face.

In theory, your results could be even worse. You may break a bone, get a concussion, or otherwise injure yourself (for example, missing a bone and hitting your teeth or eyes). People who say they enjoy breaking bones often emphasize that they do so carefully and safely. I cannot comment on the safety of any method of bone destruction.

Where did bone crushing come from?

When I first heard about breaking bones, I thought it was funny. The more I learned about it, the more I thought it was just sad. And if you dig deeper, it becomes completely dark.

Crushing bones is just one aspect of the hobby/anxiety shared by a subculture of young men who seek to alter their faces to appear more masculine. It’s the birthplace of meowing , the idea that you can do tongue exercises to create a squarer jawline (and treat or cure various health problems in the bargain). There are no peer-reviewed studies on meowing; All the complaints come from people who promote exercise.

The sad part comes when you realize how many people spend hours of their lives learning how to meow, break bones, and pull their thumb – all techniques that can be used to maximize appearance , a kind of incel-flavored pursuit of (usually male) beauty . .

There are plenty of influencers out there maximizing looks, especially on visual platforms like YouTube and Instagram, but it’s impossible to verify that their before-and-after shots capture the effect of whatever they’re promoting. In some cases, the differences are only in the pose and shooting angles. In others, the influencers are so young that I’m pretty sure we’re just seeing the effects of puberty. And there are plenty of videos in which filters have been applied to exaggerate TikTokers’ abilities, not to mention people who have undergone procedures such as filler injections.

Most of what I know about crushing bones comes from old posts on text forums; at this point, TikToks about this are mostly memes and warnings. This influencer , for example, reaches out to potential bone lovers and recommends chewing gum to tone up your jaw muscles instead, rather than hitting something in the face with something. This is at least an improvement.

Why is this even scarier than it seems?

Why are these children—and worse, some adults—so obsessed with the little details of their appearance and the appearance of others? Dive a little deeper and you’ll find yourself learning about the evolutionary traits that supposedly make people capable of being loved or wielding social power. Do you have “hunter eyes” or are you doomed to have a “scleral show” where the whites of your eyes are visible under the iris? Do you have a negative or positive “canthal tilt”? (This refers to whether the corners of your eyes are slightly above or below the horizontal.)

Of course, there is no such thing as an objectively most popular or most powerful view, and these assumptions are shattered by the slightest criticism. On the Reddit forums where these things are discussed, newbies sometimes don’t understand why there are hot celebrities with “inferior” personality traits. In one case, the response was: “Please keep in mind that this sub[reddit] is about objective beauty. …For some, scleral show may make a person more attractive, but it does not change the fact that it is not an objectively attractive trait.”

The idea that facial features determine your destiny is absurd, but it is an absurdity with a long history. For example, in the early twentieth century, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso wrote extensively about how facial features define a person as a born criminal . He advocated harsher punishment for people with such characteristics and lighter sentences—even for the same crimes—for people whose faces, according to his theories, did not appear criminal.

Facial features have also been the focus of the eugenics movement , pseudo-histories of the origins of the “Aryans” , the “science” of phrenology, and more. Scientists collected photographs to figure out the distinctive characteristics of each race , and museums measured skulls to “prove” that some races had larger brains than others and to find supposedly the purest examples of Native Americans. I can’t think of anything good that ever came out of trying to classify people based on “objective” measures of their facial features.