The Dangerous Truth About Looksmaxxing, Mewing & Facial Development | What TikTok Gets Wrong

In this episode of Breathe, Sleep & Smile, Dr. Marc Cruz and Amber dive into one of the internet’s most controversial health and beauty trends: looksmaxxing. From mewing and jaw posturing to the dangerous rise of “bone smashing,” they break down what TikTok gets surprisingly right about facial development, and where misinformation can become genuinely harmful. 

Dr. Cruz explains how modern lifestyle changes may be altering human facial structure, airway development, breathing quality, and sleep health across generations. The conversation explores why issues like mouth breathing, poor sleep, recessed jaws, and facial imbalance may be connected to much deeper health problems than most people realize. They also discuss why aesthetics often follow function, how airway-focused dentistry differs from online trends, and why early intervention matters far more than viral hacks.

This episode challenges conventional thinking around beauty, health, sleep, and modern dentistry while offering a powerful reminder: sometimes the problem isn’t vanity, it’s underlying dysfunction.

To learn more about Dr. Mark A. Cruz, DDS. visit:
https://www.MarkACruzdds.com
Dr. Mark A. Cruz, DDS. 
32241 Crown Valley Pkwy #200  
Dana Point, CA 92629  
949-661-1006 

Transcript

Deep Sleep Changes Everything

SPEAKER_01 0:00

A lot of those patients, I videotape them afterward, after their experience, and they go, Yeah, what I'm most happy is how I feel, how I wake up, my energy, I'm a whole new person, I'm in a different body, I have a different experience of weight. I I can, you know, I'm not like I don't need a GLP1 because my body is metabolically regulated because I've got deep sleep. That's where that happens, yeah. My mission is to help you transition from disease management towards to wellness, starting with your airway. If your airway is limited in any way, it affects your sleep, your health, even your smile. We treat you symptoms so that you wake up refresh, live fully, and smile freely. Visit our website, markruzds.com. Breathe sleep and be well.

Why Looksmaxing Is Everywhere

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Well, welcome back to another episode of Breathe Sleep and Smile, formerly known as Breathe Sleep and Be Well. Today we're gonna jump in to a very interesting topic that's really hot in social media, and that's looks maxing. So welcome, Amber.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Thank you for having me, Dr. Cruz.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

I'm not gonna lie, I'm very interested in knowing more about your perspective on this topic. So, looks maxing, what TikTok gets right, and actually gets dangerously wrong. There's a lot of young people that are are are looking at uh at looks maxing. So, um, you know, millions of teenagers are trying to reshape their jaw, fix their breathing on TikTok. Um, some of their uh reaching for this is clinically real. Most of what they're doing about it is wrong. And an air as an airway dentist, uh one of the uh the only people qualified to explain why, elaborate a little bit more for even people that are like, what in the heck are we even talking about

Mewing And Social Media Misinformation

SPEAKER_00 1:50

right now?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Yeah, yeah. It it's interesting. I know when I started hearing more about this, and of course it started with uh the the term mewing, um, based on John Mu, who is a friend who's now passed away, and his son, Mike Mew, we talked about this you know back some years ago, and uh interestingly, his idea was to leverage social media to raise awareness about what was very controversial in the UK and still is, and the um interventions of bioblock orthotropics is basically growth guidance of the face. And and so he got a lot of traction, as you know, it's over a billion hits worldwide. But then that really woke up a giant a bit. And I look at looks maxing, I have some patients that are really into that and influencing uh in this domain, if you will, is somewhat of a canary in the conal mine, is the way I look at it, is that they don't really quite understand. But more and more now with social media and TikTok and Instagram, people are talking to each other. They're frustrated with not getting the answers that they want. And in the age of information where you can really, you know, search and find answers for yourself, you could start maybe coming up with some solutions. And I think a lot of that, clavicular is one of the big names, is you know, trying to figure some things out. So I don't blame anyone for trying to do that, but I do think that it's somewhat dangerous. And the problem is that the need isn't being met by allopathic health care. How do you start a conversation with any provider about changing the face? You take control either by supplementing or by changing your environment in some way, um, using a hammer to smash your face, for example. That's you know, I see that. Yeah. So um, you know, posturing your jaw forward, growing facial hair, you become aware of your facial aesthetics, the balance, if you will. And that's you know, really interesting. But the problem is that at the age that these influences are doing it, it's already too late. Right. Because the face has already grown. And so it makes an argument for early intervention. But yet, if I could just say one last thing, more importantly, we're missing the health and wellness part of it. Right. Because form follows function. If you want to change the form of what you see in the mirror, maybe you start asking yourself about, you know, the overall health in dots that maybe you're not connecting. Right. And again, this is what this podcast is all about.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Yep, exactly. I mean, I really love where we're going with this, and I love I love this topic. I think a lot of people are gonna be really interested to

Why Human Jaws Are Shrinking

SPEAKER_00 4:49

know more about it. I mean, there's something real underneath it. The human jaw has actually gotten smaller across generations. So we've seen that in pictures. Um I was in uh another doctor's um office and he was showing uh pictures of ancestries of just how slick their jaws were, how wide their jaws were back in the in the you know, early 30s, 40s, 50s to compare to now, to you know, to what our ancestors look like. So, what's actually driving that and why should people even care beyond just aesthetics? What could be that driver?

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Yeah, so that's uh an underpinning of the curriculum that we've been teaching for over 15 years is understanding what I call the anthropologic standard. That we should be treating our patients towards a standard that's anthropologic versus the current standard that exists now that's already diseased. That's very well documented. The problem is that it's in the literature that doesn't really penetrate health care. It's in the anthropology literature. So most physicians or dentists aren't reading anthropology papers on the problem. And that kind of creates a little bit of a disconnect. Why is our face changing? And we know that clearly it is, and it's accelerated since the Industrial Revolution about 500 years ago, where we dramatically changed our environment or the environment in which a baby grows at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, as an aside, um, I and three other colleagues are have been working on a study that we will be publishing soon looking at the uh anthropology of the early medieval period where we're looking at skulls, and we got permission through anthropologists uh worldwide using calipers uh from the UK from certain very specific um burial sites, looking at over 300 skulls very accurately, and they had to meet certain criteria as far as they had to be intact, both the lower jaw and the upper jaw. They were using calipers, and I chose five very, very specific measurements that really related to breathing, the facial skeleton of how we breathe. And that was matched gender and age to contemporary populations using sophisticated three-dimensional software called Perkrusty's software using CBCT, which is cone beam commuter tomography. And I have probably the best known uh oral maxofacial radiologists in North America that was looking at that data using uh those measurements, and we did a comparison, and amazingly, all five of those very important measurements have changed dramatically in just 500 years. So it's happened too quickly to be explained by evolution, and and yet it's largely been missed, and yet if you really think about culturally, we really know it. So I think everyone knows about The Simpsons, right? It's this cartoon that people watch, and and if you look at all the caricatures, the artists that draw those caricatures draw them as already retrusive. There's like not much of a jaw, there's facial, it's almost funny when you start looking at it. So it's already baked into our psyche in our society, and this is just the way we are. And because it's common, we make it normal. But nothing could be further from the truth. So we really need to be um really fostering that paleolithic face instead of just straightening teeth out. Paleolithic face, uh, I'll give you a couple examples. Angelina Jolie for a female, um, Brad Pitt, if you're a woman for a male, big square jaw, high zygomatic processes, big square jaw that's forward, uh, that are not retrusive, they're straight profiles, great balance between the nose, the cheeks, the chin. There's a whole science in plastic surgery literature on the golden proportion and what the face should look like, that's actually baked into our DNA, sexual attraction to the opposite sex. There are certain in their studies that actually look at that, that portend health, meaning that I can be married and breed and have really good-looking kids that are intelligent, right, based on that. So that's like really well documented. And and so, yes, we can use makeup and have a really good personality and make up for some of these other things that are markers of aesthetic markers of um facial aesthetics and wellness and health. But um, we're missing it. And this is what the face smashing is is they're smashing the zygomatic process to try to stimulate an inflammatory response that heals, it makes them higher cheek. But it's unpredictable, and and there's some trauma involved with that, and and uh um mewing, we talked about that, is bringing the jaw forward.

unknown 9:56

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

And so a lot of these influencers, or it's on TikTok, is yeah, I can actually grow, and they do the before and afters, grow my jaw, and they're just posturing it forward. And you see that straight profile, and it does look better. More importantly, what they may not understand is they're also breathing better because they're pulling the tongue forward, and that's really the way it was intended to be from the very beginning. So, yeah, super

Treat Function First Then Aesthetics

SPEAKER_01 10:20

interesting.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Uh I mean, what's the actual difference between what these kids are trying to achieve with mewing, like you said, and what you do clinically to address to address like that jaw development and airway function? So, what is the difference?

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Yeah, you know, so for me in my uh practice in my clinic when I'm talking to patients, whether it's an adult or a mom as an example, uh I'm I'm really downplaying facial aesthetics because for me, I'm a healthcare provider and I'm really about wellness. I'm about um trying to address signs and symptoms that are symptoms of an underlying problem. So I always say that form follows function and that a beautiful face is just the icing on the cake. Um really, it's about feeling beautiful because you're feel you're uh resting well, your brain is recovering, you're not sick very often, your moods are fantastic, you're thinking everything's effortless. And typically with those individuals, their face is also you know aesthetic. They're breathing well, they're sleeping well. Um not to be confused with someone that may be doing that, but they're just high functioning, they have a way to overcome it. People talk about the Cardasians um that you know, I I think they've been talking about it as well. That yeah, it's a beautiful face, but how are they breathing and they're sleeping? And and so um facial aesthetics is icing on the cake. I want both.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Um so what as a dentist, when someone comes in for smile design, I'm actually treatment planning from the face inward. I'm looking and scanning the face, and then I'm scanning the internal, the the facial structures, and then the teeth are kind of the last. It's kind of like the furniture in a really nice living room. Right. And who cares if they're in uh beautiful furniture in a living room that's not that attractive, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

You know, so um I bad analogy, but you get my point, I think.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

I did, I visualized it because then you know you don't want really pretty teeth in a in a bad mouth.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

That doesn't have have a balance. Uh I'll give you an example with uh a classic example is the nose. Some people say, yeah, you know, I've got a big nose, and uh my my uh uncle does too, and my grandfather does too. I guess it's genetic. And the truth be told is that although there are some genetic predilections within certain ethnicities that that there may be a little bit larger nose versus, let's say, an Asian population, Pacific uh rim population that tends to have you know smaller noses proportionally, there is that factor, but by and large, it's really about the proportion. And most of the time when you're looking at someone that's got, quote unquote, a big nose, it's not so much that they have a big nose, it's that they have an underdeveloped upper and lower jaw. So it makes it look like so if their mid-face and their lower jaw were more proportionally fully grown, they don't have dental crowding, that nose now looks very, very different. And then the last thing is if you look at the hump on the nose, a lot of people have on profile, that's almost pathognomonic to um what we call bimaxillary retrusion, where the face is growing downward and back, and the cartilage gets pulled off of the hump on the nose, and then they'll go to a plastic surgeon to remove that hump to have a better nose. I kind of joke that what the plastic surgeon is doing is removing the one part of the face that's in the correct place. Right. What they really should be doing is growth guidance or moving um the job forward. And that's where our critical uh critical clinical clinical protocols come in. Skeletal expansion, clear aligners, elastics, corticotomies, all these things that we could relatively non-invasively do to make an absolutely gorgeous face, but most importantly, that sleeps well because it breathes well.

unknown 14:26

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

I like that. Yeah. I feel like I want to make an appointment. How can you get rid of the double chin and we can widen up that chin?

SPEAKER_01 14:36

How can you prove up perfection? But yeah, it is possible. It's uh yeah. I mean, I don't even like looking in the mirror because I know uh you know I'm uh it's already too late for me.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

There's no there's always something.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yeah.

Bone Smashing And Airway Red Flags

SPEAKER_00 14:47

So the dangerous end of this trend is something called bone smashing. So you mentioned it a few times. I mean, I I get like shivers in my spine just thinking of it. People are literally hitting their face to reshape. Okay. So what do you see clinically that's the the real-world version of a jaw that did not develop properly?

SPEAKER_01 15:06

Oh gosh. Well, again, what I focus on in uh the courses that I teach with my colleagues uh is the concept of the medical indications for why we would implement a dental intervention. So the way we're trained in dental school is we're dentists focusing on dental structures, which is fine, that's orthodox, makes sense. But I think the paradigm shift is really stepping back again, looking at the patient attached to those structures and looking at the facial skeleton and how it developed very early on from right when you're born, is when the problem starts, potentially, and then it just spirals through growth and development, and it's missed. It's missed by the pediatrician, it's missed by the pediatric dentist, it's missed by the orthodontist, the general dentist. And so it's supervised neglect, if you will, because I know um colleagues that have gone through the curriculum when they say, Oh my gosh, once you see the airway problem, you can't now not see it. Moreover, you see it's everywhere. Even my patients will come in, kids will come in and go, Oh my God. I was in my class and I start seeing, I go, oh my God, that kid that's acting out and everything. And I look at it, it's like, he's he's got an airway problem, Dr. Cruz. You know, what should you say? I go, look, just stay in your desk, listen to your teacher, it's not your problem to solve, but you kind of get my. Yeah, it is exactly. And and I actually did have that situation with my son back in the day when he was in uh middle school where we'd come in, and there was a particular kid that you know attempted suicide. He was depressed, and he knew it because he saw he he was really uh retrusive, so he saw those markers. So once you see it, you can't not see it. Yeah, and then as a provider, when it's when you're fluent in it, you now you start asking questions. And what's amazing is how the dots fall into place. And the patient will say, Well, how did you know that? No one's ever asked me that. And then you start going out and you saying things, and it's just rewarding because at the end of it, you could really save that patient a lot of heartache and give them a better quality of life. And that's why we went into healthcare. Really? It's not to make someone prettier. Yes, we you know, that's it. But you can, but you can, and that is important. But um a lot of those patients, I videotape them afterward, after their experience, and they go, Yeah, I really like what what it is. And honestly, I wasn't that disappointed with what I how I presented, but what I'm most happy is how I feel, how I wake up, my energy.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

A whole new person.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

I'm a whole new person, I'm in a different body, I have a different experience weight.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

I I can, you know, I'm not, I don't need a GLP one because my body is metabolically regulating because I've got deep sleep. That's where that happens. Yeah.

What Parents Should Do First

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Um I mean, okay, so if a parent is actually watching their teenager mouth breathe, snore, or have a recession, a recessed chin, and they've gone kind of down that mewing rabbit hole online, uh, what would you actually want them to do? What would be your recommendation?

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Yeah, so there's a lot to unpack in what you just said in those two sentences. I'll just first comment on the mouth breathing. So let's just understand that uh mammals, of which Homo sapien is one uh uh uh in in that family um does not breathe or exchange gas through the mouth. Every mammalian species only breathes through the nose. And don't confuse a dog that's panting as gas exchange. That's heat exchange.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

So we as humans very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

Yeah, thinking about that.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Yeah. We it well, so common. We as humans from the very beginning are supposed to breathe through our nose 90% of the time. Kristen Guy Mineau, again, I Marie's his name up again, uh, has stated in some of his studies have has actually shown that pertains to health and wellness, is breathing through the nose very efficiently versus the mouth uh is super important. If uh now, we have oral tidal breathing, we call mouth breathing as a result of language. Like right now, I am taking in air and exchanging gas by having language. Um if I were to really do it properly, I'd speak, breathe my nose, and then talk again. But you know, you get going and you start talking through your mouth, and then you'll start kind of feel a little bit like a little energy rush, a little adrenaline. Well, that is adrenaline, and I'm I'm stimulating by that mouth breathing that we do all the time. And so we're supposed to be breathing through our nose 90% of the time. And if you can't, that's a problem. So a child that's mouth breathing is likely also one that's snoring, or they have really poor quality sleep, and then they have a bunch of other things that we're not going to talk about in this particular podcast that are major problems. Um same thing with any adult as well. So with all that that you said to unpack, I just wanted to focus on the fact that we should be nose breathing. You need to really be able to do that really well.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Okay. I um when you mentioned that about the kids, I think that's a whole nother episode that we'll definitely go down to. Yes. Um what is one thing looks maxing gets accidentally right that the mainstream dental and medical community has been too slow, maybe, to take seriously?

The One Thing Looksmaxing Gets Right

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Well, maybe I go back to foreign follows function.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

What those influencers really want is to look in the mirror and maximize maximize their facial appearance. Because it's a face that is what is our externally facing the world. People come up to us, they're interviewing us, they're making judgments on do I like this person or not? It's uh I'm not saying it's a right or a wrong, but it's the truth. It's what we are showing to the rest of the world of who we are. And when you look in the mirror, doesn't anyone like to feel good about what they see? So if you just got in a barroom fight and you've got a black eye and a broken nose, you don't want to look in the mirror too often, right? It doesn't look right as an example. But if you look at just beautiful facial balance, high cheekbones, you don't even need makeup. Honestly, makeup is largely to accentuate what's not there. You uh highlight what you want to see, create shadows, what you don't, the negative space to give that I like what I look, uh, I look like. So I think they got that part of it right. And that's really what they're after. They're not really thinking about the health consequences. I think that is important.

A Safer Way To Think

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Yeah. Do you uh have anything that you want to leave off of with this topic before we dive into the next episode?

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Yeah, I I think I'll just say let's just be careful on the information that we consume. Let's really uh be thoughtful and and uh think about how we process that information. We know that uh this particular influencer ended up in the hospital recently and uh for some decisions that he took into his own hands, not a right or wrong, it's just you know, feel bad. Uh I think we need to be careful in that regard. And and I think doctor by Google has its problems. Um, but I also get it if you're not getting the answers or the information or the time from the healthcare provider, that that's also a problem. So we'll continue talking about these as a theme in our podcast. So thank you for asking that last question.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

Absolutely. And I think people should really carefully give it some thought before they put a hammer to their face. Yeah, absolutely. We'll leave it with that. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, okay. Thanks, Doctor Greg.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Yeah, it was my pleasure. Thank you.