When I first heard the term "auramaxxing," and that teenagers, mostly boys, were practicing it by getting into things like mindfulness, presence, and meditation, I thought — "Great!" Young men have a reputation for being angry and far more prone to violence than young girls, so this seemed like a positive development overall, even though the youths gave the trend an annoying name.

But as a father to two girls — and as an extremely uncool 37-year-old — I wanted to learn a little bit more about this surprising trend. So I fired up TikTok and got to searching.

What is "auramaxxing"?

If you're a Millennial or Gen-Xer, you can think of auramaxxing as trying to get as many "cool points" as possible.

It's doing things (and not doing other things) in order to cultivate a better aura.

Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines aura as a "distinctive atmosphere surrounding a given source," or "an energy field that is held to emanate from a living being." So kids who auramax are trying to have a better energy about them. I can see the appeal.

Urban Dictionary calls auramaxxing "The process of maximizing your aura so your presence can be felt before being seen or so that your presence is stronger."

In that definition, you can start to see that auramaxxing isn't really about self-actualization or becoming a better person, it's about appearing more powerful and attractive to other people.

"Auramaxxing is a limb or offshoot on the same tree as rizz. Both rizz and auramaxxing began primarily within audiences of young men, before spreading to culture more broadly," Tom Miner, a social media and trends expert with Gold Miner Media said.

"As a sports fan, I started noticing the term 'good aura' popping up in the last couple years to describe an athlete's hot streak (often times an NBA player). Auramaxxing seems to be an adaption of this."

I asked my 9-year-old (who's not on TikTok) if she had heard the term aura, if anyone in her 5th grade class was saying it. She said Yes and gave an example.

A teammate on her soccer team had missed a shot in practice, she told me, and everyone said "You're losing so many aura points!"

So whether or not kids that young are intentionally "auramaxxing," it's clear that the idea has spread far and wide — and even 9-year-olds know and are quantifying the fact that doing something embarrassing makes you look bad.

Auramaxxing videos on TikTok don't start off so bad. They're more corny than toxic.

The first thing I saw after searching for auramaxxing on TikTok was the account of a young guy named Drew Ford. He's a 24-year-old unshaven, t-shirt wearing guy who inhales spirituality books and doles them out in bite-sized amounts to his followers — and runs a free course called the Subconscious Mastery Challenge.

Drew's advice to grow your aura is simple:

• Be present in the moment
• Stop comparing yourself to others
• Read books
• Be authentic
• Be open minded
• Learn from failure

(And sign up for his email list, of course)

Is he actually qualified to speak on this subject? Probably not.

But as much as it makes me cringe as an adult, it's not the worst advice I've ever heard. It's not going to hurt anyone to practice being more aware in the present moment.

If this was what auramaxxing was really all about, maybe I could get onboard.

From there, you get into the world of jokes and trolling.

In the auramaxxing world, there's this idea of aura points that's really prevalent.

Doing things that are cool earns you points, doing things that are uncool loses points. Most articles I've read about auramaxxing seem to be really concerned about these points. And I can see why. It sounds like a Black Mirror episode, but when I really started watching videos about aura points, it seemed more like Whose Line Is It Anyway — no one is actually keeping track of their score, and it's mostly for laughs. In fact, there were some videos that seemed to be making fun of the whole trend and idea of aura points — they had me cracking up. Like this one:

As I went deeper, auramaxxing started to become heavily gendered toward boys, and it developed a lot of crossover with the incel world.

Further into my search, I came across creators who seemed to take aura a lot more seriously. To them, having a strong masculine aura was essential to getting dates and having success in life. This is where you start to learn that to truly maximize your aura (as a man), you need to:

• Lift weights and pack on muscle
• Talk less
• Be more mysterious
• Get a better haircut and clothes
• Learn the truth about "modern females"

It's not hard to see how this kind of content leads to extremely toxic ideas about masculinity, misogyny, and more. The whole concept that auramaxxing might actually help boys open up and be less angry was going out the window. Here, we're outright encouraging young men to clam up and suppress their vulnerability.

It's just Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson in a flashy TikTok package. Now I was started to get a little freaked out. But from there it only got worse.

To truly maximize your aura, I learned, you also had to optimize for the physical component of your presence. You had to looksmax, and heightmax, as well.

Yes, those are real terms.

Looksmaxing is exactly what it sounds like — looking your absolute best. But where I expected to see fashion advice, I saw videos about using supplements and doing eye-stretching exercises to "reduce upper eyelid exposure" and "achieve Hunter Eyes" — which is a narrow, intense eye shape you see in models and famous actors.

Photo by Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash

In addition to diet and exercise, I learned you should also sculpt your jaw with mewing and using weird tools, and you should dunk your face in ice every morning to reduce puffiness.

And though it looks like TikTok has cracked down on it, I learned there was a whole genre of looksmaxxing related to "bone-smashing" — or intentionally hitting yourself in the face with heavy objects to reshape your bone structure.

There's even a popular app called Umax that scans your face and tells you how hot (or ugly) you are, along with how much potential you have to be hotter if you follow all the looksmaxxing tips.

For short guys, there's heightmaxxing content, too — wherein random unqualified teens and twenty-somethings recommend exercises, diets, and supplements to make you grow taller. I saw a lot of videos about "banded sleeping," which is binding yourself in a stretched position overnight.

(To be fair, young girls have been under intense pressure to "look their best" forever — but now the expectations have been cranked up to 11 for just about everyone.)

It really frightened me how quickly we got from just wanting other people to think we're cool — which every generation of teens that has ever existed has worried about — to "self-improvement" tips that are extremely dangerous.

The only thing that gives me solace as a parent is that I don't get the sense most people actually take this stuff seriously. Kids talk about aura with a sense of sarcasm and playfulness, for the most part, and a large majority won't follow the trend all the way to the extremes.

And though this all sounds absolutely terrible, it's still easy to find plenty of examples of young people not picking each other apart, but picking each other up.

"A few months back, we saw Gen Z women posting their embarrassing moments, asking how many aura points they lost with each story," says Sallie Stacker, an associate creative director and emerging trends expert at Edelman.

"But instead of being dragged, the community rallied behind them, gifting points for sharing their vulnerability. It seems like what really loses aura points is acting against the nature of who you are."

Let's hope that sticks, and the rest fades away quickly – as fads and trends usually do. But if you notice your teen meditating or suddenly getting really into skincare (or buying a jaw-sculpting tool), you might want to double check where they're getting their advice.