Beautiful chin area through chewing gum – what’s behind the trend

There was a time when Kate Moss’s extremely slim silhouette was the ultimate in body aesthetics. Back then, it was called heroin-chic, but today it’s called toxic. Then there was a time when men built like action figures, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude van Damme, were the measure of male sexiness. Depending on the decade, what is considered beautiful lies somewhere between Bowie androgyny and Dolly Buster breasts, fitness influencers and Rubens sensuality. Part of the current fashion: a chin sharper than razor blades. The men of Gen Z are literally grit their teeth for this. They have found their alcohol for the perfect chin in chewing gum.

Beauty ideals are an unfair thing. Some are lucky and blessed with the right genetics, others have to work hard or even undergo surgery to achieve the currently popular look. Butts are shaped with squats, the jawline – the English term for the jaw line is more common in this context – with facial exercises. The training instrument: chewing gum, as hard as possible. On TikTok and YouTube, Gen Z men in particular practice chewing gum like a high-performance sport. They document their supposed progress from a flabby chin to a Clark Kent profile in videos.

Ultra-hard chewing gums are supposed to make them more attractive

There are now a number of chewing gum brands that have jumped on the trend. They offer chewing gum that was developed specifically for the purpose of facial fitness, i.e. training the facial muscles. One of them is “Stronger Gum”. The brand advertises that it can shape the chin area within two weeks. Or the competitor “Jawliner”, which declares its product directly as facial fitness chewing gum. The numbers show that the companies are in tune with the times. Jawliner is said to have already sold more than a million packs of chewing gum, company spokeswoman Tiffany Tran reported to the “New York Times”. 60 percent of customers are between 18 and 25 years old.

Is the hype about the chewing utensil justified or is the Jawliner chewing gum just clever marketing again? On the one hand, there are the chewing gum companies, who argue, among other things, with a study from 2018. This suggests that an improvement in biting power can be achieved by chewing gum. The cautious wording in the subjunctive is not a coincidence. With only 19 participants, it was a mini-study with little significance. Overall, the scientific data is more than manageable. In addition, various experts have already spoken out who are at least skeptical about chewing gum for facial modeling or even advise against it. The dentist Dr. Andrea Jacob is one of them.

Chewing gum for the perfect chin?

Jacob tested the Jawliner chewing gum himself for almost two months. On the website, the dentist talks about her experiences and explains the sense and nonsense of the trend. The chewing gum she tested, which was explicitly labeled as chin-defining, was “brutally hard”. So hard that she pulled out an inlay while chewing. She says clearly: “You need healthy teeth for this kind of chewing gum – solid fillings, solid bridges”. She also explains that the human body has more muscles for closing the jaw than for opening it, so the movement tends to be towards closing anyway. If this is pushed and over-stressed, thereby increasing an imbalance between the closer and opener, this can lead to extreme problems. People who already have problems in this area, for example tend to grind their teeth, should especially keep their hands off the chewing gum. “That would be like pouring oil on the fire,” she says.

And what about the optical effects? Does constant chewing have any effect? ​​If you believe the videos on social media: Yes. There, many young men attribute their angular facial features to chewing gum. Whether or not you actually lose weight in the jaw area also depends on your body fat percentage, says Andrea Jacob. She says: “If there is a bit more flesh in the area, you won’t be able to reduce it and build muscle within 30 days.” Jacob’s own chin and jaw area hasn’t really changed after months of chewing gum. Her conclusion: “My self-experiment didn’t achieve its goal.”

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