James Sapphire: Looksmaxxing Gone Wrong @Kiwi tapes

Watch on YouTube · 2025-10-21 · 30 min

0:00 What's up guys, some of you want me to review a video about James Sapphire. I've never heard of the guy, but based on the title, I assume that it's about how looksmaxing can go wrong.

[video] 0:13 Looksmaxing. Mogging. Bone smashing. Mewing. What do all of these words mean? I've heard them thousands of times in various meme contexts, but didn't know where they came from. That is until researching the subject of today's video, James Sapphire. What I thought would be a simple story of a man doing anything he could to look better, and it going horribly wrong, ended up being a rabbit hole of incel forms, internet terminology, and gaslighting. because while this video may be about James and his bone-smashing endeavors, it's also going to be about the wider looks-maxing community.

0:50 Thankfully, I have never looked into the topic, I've never been on any forums. This right away reminds me of that Andrew Jenny guy, the one that I reviewed recently. Yeah, also went completely wrong.

[video] 1:14 An online community dedicated to doing almost anything necessary to look more attractive. And I think there is no better place to start than with James' story. One of a struggling kid who is gaslit by the internet. James was born in Dallas, Texas in the early 2000s. His mother is an adult film star, drug addict, currently homeless, as well as mentally unstable. James' father would sadly pass away in his military service, and with the condition of his mother, he was sent to live with extended relatives. And things would be relatively normal

1:45 Losing the father, obviously, naturally, can be very hard on the children. Everybody, obviously, anyway, in the family, but the children especially, and the boys.

2:01 Yeah, growing up without a father is very tough and then you don't have anybody to lead you. And then it's way easier to fall for lies on the internet. That's how it always has been. That's why you're put into school. You're much easier to control if your parents are not around you.

[video] 2:24 for James until around the age of 14 when one of his fellow classmates called him a pretty boy. Unsure of what this meant, young James looked it up and was eventually led to a looks maxing site. There are a couple of these looks maxing sites and they are forms for looks maxing. Some of the users have intentions

2:41 Yes, people nowadays are very obsessed with their looks. We didn't have this when I grew up. And that was just in the 90s, basically. That's when I was a child. But even after the year 2000.

2:57 nobody talked about looks nothing but the worse the development is and the health of the people today the more they obsess over looks of course and if you're on looks maxing forums or whatever they use I've heard that there's forums out there, maybe Reddit or something. Then obviously it's mentally super unhealthy. You're focusing on something which you probably won't ever be able to fix anyway. That's the biggest problem. There's some things you can do here and there, but overall these people simply want a natural and well-developed body, just a healthy body. Usually that's all that they want. If you would recommend Accutane, for example, for acne, but you really want this healthy, glowing skin by eating natural food, seeing as acne is only caused by bad food.

[video] 3:55 ...of helping people improve themselves, but like almost every other form, they are... Hello, chicks.

4:03 Alright, what is this, man? Eh, whatever.

[video] 4:06 ...are filled with trolls. James, who is 14 years old and unsure about himself and the world, would seek the advice of these form users on his appearance and how he could improve it.

4:19 James described... Mmm, bad idea. Bad idea, man. You're not going to find people who care about you and who want you to do good in your life. That's not the mentality that these people would have. Naturally, it makes no sense. They are miserable. They are unhappy with the way they look like. That's why they are there. And they are not going to be giving you good advice. Not only because they don't care about you, but also because they just wouldn't even know how to become healthy and good looking. Firstly, you need to improve your health for the first one or two years at least. Start eating naturally. Then after that, you can think about doing something here and there. but nothing hardcore.

[video] 5:09 ... himself as popular during the start of high school, he would receive attention from girls and get invited to parties. But after falling down the rabbit hole of looks maxing, it was all over for him. Trollsome form users began to gaslight James into believing that he was ugly, telling him that he would need extensive cosmetic surgery as well as steroids to ever appear normal. He would spend a lot of time browsing these forms, looking for new ways to increase his attractiveness. as well as absorbing the internet forum's culture. He would develop a hate towards women and towards people of other races that would show as time went on. I want to make it very clear that during all of this, James was a mere child and was being influenced by trolls across the internet to do so many horrible things.

5:48 Yes, when you're young, you're very gullible, you fall for anything, which is how it's naturally supposed to be because your parents, your family are supposed to shape you into the human being that you are or will be. That's normal, that's good, naturally, but when you're surrounded by fake people, liars, Depressed miserable people on forums kind of indirectly because it's online obviously they're not there in real life But you get what I mean or even if there would be no internet then people at your school These are not people that you would have any contact with in nature some random people strangers And if these people shape you into who you are or who you will be then it's a big problem and then It can go really wrong, which I guess will be the case here. We'll see what happens.

[video] 6:41 A prime example of this would be the transition of his now-deleted TikTok page, which started with typical dancing videos and slowly morphed into looks-maxing shitposts. And when some of his fellow classmates caught wind of his antics, they weren't too happy. They began to extort and threaten James. causing him to drop out of high school and never return. After dropping out, James would put all of his attention into social media and the production of his own music. Before things started to get very bad for James, he made a song called Together about his dream girl. The pop song produced by James became pretty popular on TikTok as a soundbite, as the lyrics were considered cringe by the wide majority of the public. As time went on, James fell deeper and deeper into these forum websites and the behavior that came with them. James became a very big troll, which is why it's hard to piece together exactly what the truth is behind him. He has made a lot of conflicting statements just for the meme, and I base a wide majority of the things that I say about him on recent statements he has made after becoming clean and taking a step away from the black-pilled community.

[video] 7:38 He was abusing a wide variety of substances, from amphetamines to steroids, all in an attempt to looksmax, and at the ad-

7:45 But how would steroids increase your looks exactly? You would get the illusion of a wider frame because of

8:00 lots of water in the muscles for the most part of course when you work out they will also grow and adapt to you lifting and pulling metal that's all clear but for the most part it's an illusion seeing as you won't be able to change the actual natural frame which are the bones Hmm, interesting. Yeah, you're gonna get the worst advice on Earth on those forms or whatever.

[video] 8:30 ...advice of trolls on this form website, claiming years later to be in full-blown psychosis around these times. Even though James wasn't eating much because of the substances, he still believed himself to be overweight, leading him to develop anorexia. It was widely speculated that James was abusing facial surgeries because of his unusual appearance at the time, but this was not the case as it was just a mixture of these substances and anorexia. which were taking a brutal toll on both his mind and body.

8:56 A window into his mindset would be the music that he would... Yeah, it's also very strange how people in that community believe that low body fat looks good. That model guy, the Jordan guy... why did he also ruin himself like that he lost all the weight and some people speculate that he took out the fat from the cheeks obviously it looked super unhealthy which automatically means unattractive hmm very strange the whole thing makes no sense Nobody has ever looked better with low body fat. That doesn't exist. Low body fat makes you automatically look unhealthy.

9:45 an unappealing biological mate, because it doesn't seem as if reproduction is a plausible idea. It's just your instinct when you look at somebody.

[video] 10:00 ... around this time, being his second viral TikTok sound. The song would be called Black Pilled Curse, and I believe it jump-started all of the craze behind these terms being used in memes. Things like mewing the act of holding your tongue to the roof of your mouth to improve a jawline structure or mugging the process I've never seen any example of that actually working Just makes no sense.

10:22 I'm open to it But, uh, just show me one example. Well, one could be faked. Show me, like, five.

[video] 10:31 ...of intimidating someone just by looking more attractive than them. James took these terms that were used by the wider looks-maxing community and shot them right into the veins of TikTok. I would be personally lying if I didn't say Black Pilled Curse is a hilarious song, but knowing the context behind what James was doing at the time makes it just a little darker. James would continue to make harmful decisions, continue to be trolled, and continue to go on unhinged rants across various forums and social media profiles. That is until he overdosed and was admitted to a state mandatory rehab facility. While James still has suffered from some struggles, it has been leaps and bounds.

11:05 He also had eczema here. Maybe from all the drugs. Who knows what he was eating. Do people in the LuxMaxing community even talk about food or diet at all? I don't know. Maybe they just say use drugs and do surgeries. I'll show you in a different video how much more beautiful people become when they become healthy. If you would want to rate people or put some kind of points for the improvement of looks, then I would say it improves your looks by two, three, sometimes four points. It's actually sometimes insane how much your looks improve when you become healthy.

[video] 11:53 That's him? No, yeah?

12:00 Really? Can't even recognize him. Yeah, James Today. Wow, okay. Oh, I thought this is a kind of story about a guy who... Well, you get it. I thought that it completely went wrong.

12:17 Hmm, good.

[video] 12:31 he wasn't a child how old was he there he was for sure not a child still he was young and impressionable no doubt from time to time but the videos were simple having nothing to do with looks maxing we wouldn't hear much from james until february 2024 when he would make a lengthy video explaining the truth behind what had happened all those years ago it was in response to a youtube video that had been made about him by a creator that had had previous prejudice The creator had privately DM'd James saying things like they were going to use the video to paint him like a r*** in the a, making a number of fabricated claims about James knowingly doing so. This prompted James to make one of his longest videos to date at around 40 minutes, where he clears up the misconceptions about him and shares his side of the story, speaking on a number of things, from his time in the looks-maxing community to his current relationship with his mother. I hate to be making a video like this under these circumstances, but

[video] 13:27 I know deep down it's the right thing to do for myself, others, and just for everyone's sake and the whole situation.

[video] 13:36 It came to light of me recently that some people have been making videos about me and I'm just here to address all that and clear some stuff up because it's gotten quite out of hand and Yeah, if you've seen the other video, you'll see that he purposely made that to make me out to be a quote-unquote psychopath, I believe. Which is not who I am at all, and that is not who I want to be. Most of that stuff was... How do I say it?

[video] 14:09 Unfortunately, there were some truths to the matter regarding a lot of these videos, but it was mostly a lot of lies, and I'm here to debunk this.

[video] 14:20 First off, I didn't eat my shit. That's fing weird and gross. I shower. I never drank my piss. It was literally fing Ben & Jerry's and Minute Maid lemonade. It's very odd to me, looking at this community and this side of the internet. It seems like these people can't quite grasp the concept of what satire is and irony. What started as a whole f***ing joke, dude, evolved into a something that's took over most of my life and i've really dedicated the past year to um changing that and trying to fix that i've been in and out of mental health facilities i've had to go through like four different therapists and psychiatrists and all that stuff and like i'm just gonna be completely honest with you guys um my uh my mom my biological mother gave me um

[video] 15:15 crystal methamphetamine, I don't know if you guys know what that is, but it's a stimulant and Yeah, it's like the king of amphetamines and I went into like pretty severe psychosis. I was like seeing demons and I remember going to a plastic surgery clinics with her when I was a little kid and she always told me that my my ears were misshapen and my nose wasn't going to be small forever and I was going to have to get surgery and

15:47 other stuff dude like she severely impacted my self-image in person yeah when it comes from somebody who's so close to you it hits the hardest because you want to feel loved by them you want to feel as if they care about you they accept you the way you are your family anyway your mother father siblings But oftentimes if they are messed up or if they have problems with their looks, then they will project it onto you. For example, if you have some brother who has some kind of issues or somebody said something about him, then he may come back home and let it out on you. Yeah.

16:38 Yeah, it's other people being hurt and then they hurt other people in return if they don't hurt the people who hurt them, which will usually be the case if a group of people target somebody in a school. Yeah, that's messed up. Obviously, the mother wasn't mentally healthy, to say the least, as the narrator of the video said. I don't know anything about that, but I'll take his word for it. It sounds like it also, from what James is saying, because it's not normal for a mother to do that.

[video] 17:12 But yeah, this is me, dude.

[video] 17:16 I ain't getting no surgery. I'm a normal guy. Made some bad choices, had some bad people affect me, but... You know, it's over with now, they can't hurt me anymore. One of James's major contentions with the video is the fact that the creator claimed he had received massive amounts of facial surgery. James claims that this is not the case, as he was just abusing steroids as well as having a severe case of an*****ia.

17:41 Hmm... Wasn't he also doing the bone smashing? Very low body fat... As we can see with other people nowadays, the drugs do change your face also. You become very... Well, you can see, I don't need to name it anything, call it anything. It's clear what happens.

[video] 18:04 And a drug habit. All of these things compounded resulted in his appearance at the time. And now that he practices almost none of these things, he has gone back to his more healthy appearance. James would also...

18:17 Okay, yes, of course, still, I get that he went through hell, but of course, still, eating healthy would be better for your mental health also, just to be healthy overall. Going from something like that to eating garbage again is also not a solution really for your life and to be happy and healthy. Yeah. Whatever, I guess that it's better, I suppose, yeah. Well, yeah. Better than what the mom did to him and everything with the drugs.

[video] 18:53 ...discussed the text messages that he had received from that creator, talking about how they were going to use the video to paint him in a negative light. He would also discuss the psychosis that he was suffering from at the time. James was in his late teens and he was abusing extremely hard substances. He claimed that he would see demons, hear voices, and was extremely easy to manipulate. Today, he wants to apologize for two things mainly. all of the r***** remarks that he had made in the past, and the popularizing of the now infamous TikTok trend, bone smashing. Before I talk about bone smashing, I want to define a couple more terms for you. I know that we just went over mewing and mogging, I'm sure you're exhausted, but there's a couple more you need to know. First of which is looks maxing, the act of trying to do anything to make you look better, but That's funny because exercise would make you look worse. It would make you look unhealthy, create dark eye circles, wrinkles, bad skin.

[video] 19:53 James falls into abusing steroids, bleaching, bone smashing, those kinds of things. And then there's surgery maxing, which is what James was accused of, abusing a ton of surgeries to heighten your appearance. Bone smashing falls into the category of hard maxing, meaning that it is considered an extreme procedure even in the looks-maxing community. And before I discuss it any further, I want to highly recommend against anyone doing this to themselves, It seems like the medical information about this one is all over the place, and no person should ever feel like they have to take these steps merely to appear pleasing to other people. Bone smashing is the process of hitting yourself in the face with a hard object, usually a hammer, to improve the shape of your face. Allegedly. It is based on the principle of Wolf's Law, a law that dictates bones will grow harder as they suffer damage and heal. James Sapphire is highly credited with the popularization of this trend on TikTok. And after doing it for over two years, James now renounces the practice. A popular website online about understanding memes called NoTikTok

20:51 As I said before, that would be, again, you trying to imitate bigger or possibly wider bones, if you want them to grow bigger and give the appearance of having wider bones, which all only come from food, nothing else. Actually, I'll talk about that at the end of the video, I think that it's almost over anyway.

[video] 21:13 Your meme would do an interview with James as well as a number of other people who practiced bone smashing. They would ask what some of the effects were, if they had any regrets, and some of the responses were pretty interesting, so I'm going to read them for you here. When asked about how they got into bone smashing, one anonymous interviewee stated, When I was about 11, I signed up for this forum called incels.is. Then after lo- For a bit, I found the form looksmax.org. After lurking on looksmax.org, I found theories about bone smashing. A number of these other people also state that they found out about bone smashing because of looksmax websites and TikTok. All of them discovering this in their early teens. When asked if they had seen any results from the smashing, almost all of them stated yes, though they were very minor. When asked about the downsides, one stated that he suffered from nerve damage, and the other one stated that the only downside was the bruising and bleeding. When asked if they had an end goal, all of them stated various answers.

[video] 22:07 The interviewees who started practicing bone smashing towards the younger side were asked if they had any regrets starting so young. And one response really stuck with me. I am not happy I did it. Doing it made me obsess over my entire face, like my negative canthal tilt, and the way my jaw is. I don't even know what a canthal tilt is. I don't think a kid should be obsessing how it's quote-unquote negative. But after spending-

22:29 Nobody at all should be thinking about this because there are no mirrors in nature. The only mirror that you would have would be the way your family would react to you the way they would.

22:49 look at you the face expressions that they would make but uh it would all of course be just love and them caring about you anyway that's why this has never been a thing this is very new actually it's very unhealthy insanely unhealthy and more importantly very unnatural very abnormal for human beings we should not be seeing ourselves at all

[video] 23:18 enough time on these look-smaxing websites, which are just glorified forms, he developed a complex so bad that he resorted to bone smashing. The article by Know Your This was during James's treatment and he hadn't fully come out of his psychosis at the time. He previously stated that his overdose messed him up a lot and he is still psychologically recovering from that to this day. Though I am very happy to hear that James is in recovery and getting the help that he needs, I see him as part of a much bigger problem on the internet. It's called pilling, and basically it's the act of gaslighting someone into believing something that they never would if you hadn't done it, convincing them that they are either ugly, crazy, or not who they appear to be, merely for the sick satisfaction of changing their mindset. Pilling takes many different forms on the internet, and the people who are most susceptible to it are children. James was 14 years old when people began to pill him into looking like a Bogdanov twin. They pilled him into being a horribly and into doing various dangerous things to his own body.

[video] 24:18 James was in a very vulnerable place as he never had a father and his mother was very absent from his life. When they did have interactions later in James's life, he claims that she introduced him to substances, furthering his descent into these form websites and looks maxing. It seems like this kind of pilling behavior is appearing across more and more communities as time goes on. The aspect of controlling and manipulating someone else's life is very appealing to these people. James Sapphire should be a cautionary tale to anyone that uses the internet, especially to children and parents who allow their children online. The internet is a truly beautiful place with the information of ideas, free speech, and friendships being unparalleled by anything else in the world. But with that freedom, there is also a dark, seedy underbelly. People who get a sick kick out of gaslighting and manipulation. Who want to use the internet as a tool to hurt others. And though James has made a fair few of mistakes, I would say that he is a victim of this.

[video] 25:14 A kid with absolutely no guidance, who received some of the worst advice possible.

25:20 and still lives with the consequences yeah this was pretty messed up what i wanted to explain to you before is that these people for the most part try to imitate good development and of course there's also the genetic side as in the inheritance to it There's just a lot that you will not be able to inherit also from your parents. But for the most part, they want a wide jaw, wide big bones, a wide frame also in general. That's why the steroids. They want clear, healthy, glowing skin, which you get by eating what humans eat in nature, raw animal foods.

26:17 They just don't understand it. And if younger guys get into it, as you can see, they can completely ruin their life and they could instead simply eat naturally. They would become super healthy. They would be actually mentally healthy. They would actually be happy because of their gut, which would be healthy. whole body the whole system would be functioning the way it should then you also wouldn't make such mistakes you would have clear skin and when it comes to this specific topic their skull which is what they mostly talk about would develop the way it should of course a lot happens in the womb and especially when you're a baby if you're not breastfed long enough that's also going to be a problem but

27:12 a lot really a lot also happens before during and right after puberty in that period and that's when your skull can really significantly still grow if you eat naturally with this you're gonna try to achieve the illusion of being well developed and it's futile In some ways, maybe it may look like it kind of worked out, but it's never going to be the same. It's never going to look normal. As you can see with these guys, as I mentioned before, androgenic, he can try it as much as he wants. It completely backfired. He went the opposite way basically. Nature is the only way.

28:11 My girlfriend, for example, as I've mentioned before, she's a model, and she told me a lot of stories about her life. And it's true that in this system, you're going to be treated really well if you are handsome as a guy, tall also, or beautiful as a girl. A lot of doors will open. She has been invited to... millionaire parties uh pd parties on a huge boat everything you hear about in movies uh everything you

28:51 think is true is really true. It is really this way that people are going to treat you a lot better. Whatever you do career-wise is going to be better, but she never did any surgeries in her life, no procedures whatsoever. She came from a really good Russian bloodline Her mother is also super beautiful. And that's because Russians, just like all Europeans back in the day, but then more so later still, ate really good food. A lot of organs, really fatty meat, fatty pork. She grew up eating leberwurst, a lot of super thick slices. That's why she also developed really well. My point is simply that it's true.

29:43 that in this system also naturally but in a different way of course because it has all to do with nature in the end obviously in the system also you will be treated a lot better that's just nature but the way to achieve it is only through nature if you try to go the unnatural route you're gonna end up looking like androgenic and some other guy which i found out about recently i'm gonna make a separate video about him or like james sapphire that was also an interesting story point being um it's never gonna end well thanks for watching