"My goal is to be very famous, very rich, and very handsome"

Ben Gandis is only 24 years old, but he has already undergone rhinoplasty, uses colored lenses, had eyebrow treatment, straightens his hair, and sometimes wears makeup. According to him, he plans to undergo facial fat removal, inject hyaluronic acid into his jaw, chin, and cheekbones, and get braces. Later, he is also considering procedures to change the appearance of his eyes, and for the past three years, he has been interested in limb-lengthening surgery, although he has not yet decided if he will undergo it. All of these are part of looksmaxxing, an internet term for the attempt to maximize external attractiveness through changes in appearance. The range is wide: at the moderate end are fitness, grooming, haircuts, and clothing, and at the more extreme end are injections, cosmetic procedures, and surgeries.

"Maximizing is extreme, and it doesn't concern 99 percent of people," he says in a conversation with mako. "But it does concern me. In my subjective experience, I am truly doing looksmaxxing with all the means you can imagine."

Gandis entered the gym at the age of 13, and even then the goal was clear. "I did it for aesthetic and body image reasons," he says. "Most young people who want to work out do it for aesthetic and appearance reasons, not for health reasons. Even today, being in shape, with a low body fat percentage, good body composition, and muscle mass is a very important part of looksmaxxing."

At 17, he began uploading videos about fitness and nutrition to TikTok and became famous thanks to the content he published about caloric deficit. "I pushed this concept seriously, and that's where I became famous. For years, my nickname was 'Caloric Deficit,' and to this day people call me that." Success on the web came just before his enlistment, and he feared that service would stop the path he had started to build. "I wanted to be a fitness instructor in the army so I could continue training, because the whole body image thing was super important to me, and also so I could continue creating content. Honestly, I also didn't want to get wounded and die."

However, the encounter with the combat path changed his plans. "I was exposed to combat training and then I realized I wanted to be a fighter. I wanted to do something I had never done in my life, because I knew that after I was discharged I would return to fitness." He reached the Border Police (Magav), went to two tryouts, and according to him, finally reached the YAMAM and even completed a commanders' course. On June 19, 2023, just two weeks before his discharge and during what was supposed to be his last operation in Jenin, he was wounded. "I stepped on an explosive device. I had serious blast injuries to my left leg and shrapnel throughout my ankle and knee."

He was hospitalized for a total of three months in hospitals, in Rambam and Sheba. After his discharge, he returned to work as a fitness trainer, but in 2024 he stopped training and content creation to complete his matriculation exams and prepare for studies. It was then that he reached, according to him, the lowest point in terms of how he saw himself. "I stopped training and reached the bottom of my appearance. I looked the worst I had ever looked, and that is the main engine that caused me to enter looksmaxxing."

From his perspective, the novelty of looksmaxxing is not in the actual desire to look good, but in the transition from focusing on the body to focusing on the face. "The fitness world always sold the same thing to those who want to look good: start training, get in shape, dress nicer, and get abs. There was always a huge emphasis on the body. Looksmaxxing comes to turn this around and put the main emphasis on the face. It's a much broader approach. It's the wellness and fitness of 2026." According to him, the preoccupation with the face was there even before he knew the American trend, but in the last half year he began to take it further. "I was always a looksmaxxer, regardless of the trend that became popular with Americans and on social networks, but in the last half year I was strongly influenced by it and took it to an extreme."

In the coming month, he says, he plans to undergo facial fat removal and inject hyaluronic acid into his jaw, chin, and cheekbones. He is also considering procedures that will make his eyes narrower and more lifted — a look called in the community "hunter eyes," as well as a permanent change in eye color. "I keep reading about it. At first, I thought the risks were great, and slowly I understand that maybe they are not as great as I thought. On the other hand, even lenses are not free of risks."

The most extreme possibility he talks about is limb-lengthening surgery. "I've been stewing on this for three years," he says. "As I continue to learn about plastic surgery and cosmetics, more and more places for improvement open up to me. It could be that I think I have a certain disadvantage and that there is no solution, and then I discover that there is a procedure that can fix something I thought was impossible to fix."

What does the family think about it? "My family loves and doesn't love it. They see that in practice I look better and are happy about it, but they also see that I continue to worsen. They are afraid that I will ruin myself, that I am exaggerating, that there will be health damage, or that there will be unnecessary risks in plastic surgery. There is some truth in what they say." He also admits that not every treatment provides the promised result. "I did a cosmetic procedure that was supposed to remove a double chin and it didn't work. I paid a lot of money for it for nothing. I don't think I will regret the things I do, but who knows? That's also part of reality."

Gandis also rates himself. "There were periods when I didn't look good. I'm 1.70 meters tall, I was quite neglected, and I was after surgery and swollen. 'Ugly' is a subjective definition, but at one point I looked like a 4 out of 10." Today, according to him, the situation is different. "If I'm talking only about the face, I would say I look better than 75 to 80 percent of people. If I were taller, it would raise me significantly."

The change, he says, is already translating into life itself. "It has greatly affected my confidence and I am reaping the fruits in an extreme way. On dating apps, very objectively, the amount of matches I get has increased significantly. I go on much more interesting dates, it's much easier for me with girls, many men also compliment me. It translates into all these things even when they don't recognize me from the web."

He does not hide that women are a central part of the motivation. "A significant part of the goal of looksmaxxing is girls, but it's not exclusive to looksmaxxing. Also, many men who want to make a lot of money or achieve fame do it to attract girls. If you look at it evolutionarily, in the end, everything boils down to reproducing."

Some of his advice provokes harsh reactions, especially a video in which he suggested that short men keep their height-increasing shoes on even at a girl's house they arrived at. "If you reached the bed, you can take off the shoes because she won't notice the height anymore, and if you are standing you can put them back on," he explains. "There are enough positions where she won't notice at all that you didn't take off the shoes. If it gets really weird, you can choose other positions."

Gandis insists that the things are not part of a character built for the web. "It's important to me to be very honest, authentic, and transparent. Sometimes, as part of the content strategy, you exaggerate a bit, but on a general level, everything you see is me."

He tries to expose the risks, including a decrease in sexual desire, when one of the treatments took a toll on him in a particularly sensitive place. "The reason I stopped being horny is a hair loss medication," he says. Even this he chooses to publish, although the exposure might damage the image he is building for himself. "It's part of reality and the risks of the things I do. It's important to reflect that too."

Criticism is present in almost every video of his, but according to him, reality is more complex. "There is plenty of bad, but in reality, plenty of people approach me, and I receive hundreds of messages of support. There is no doubt that the hate is much higher on the networks, but it's very easy to get hate there." He also does not claim that all criticism is unfounded. "I can't blame them for everything, because there are things that on the face of it, the criticism of them is justified. But my goal is to lead opinion and change a certain perception among people, and that's not easy."

Today he wants to turn looksmaxxing from an underground phenomenon into a local community. "At the level of content creation, it's probably just me, but the field itself is very underground. To reap all the fruits of looksmaxxing, it's probably better not to talk about the fact that you are doing these things. I talk about it because I am a thought leader." According to him, Israel is still relatively conservative and macho when it comes to male grooming, partly because of military service, but he believes that a content creator with strong messages can change the attitude towards the field.

In three or four years, he believes he will look completely different, but the external change is only part of the plan. "My goal is to be very famous, very rich, very handsome, and also to lead opinion in this field. I want to show that this field is more beautiful than people think, and explain to people that appearance, whether you like it or not, plays a very important role in a person's quality of life."