SunnyD, a fruit drink aimed at children, ran an advert telling people to go "mogging in peace".

"Mogging" comes from AMOG, an acronym from pick-up artist forums meaning Alpha Male of the Group. It described a man trying to out-rank his rivals in front of a woman.

Nobody at SunnyD looked it up.

What is going on

Marketers have discovered the suffix "maxxing" and gone at it with both hands. Marriott sold Labor Day hotel stays as "weekend maxxing". Harry's said its new razor was good for "jawmaxxing". The Cheesecake Factory floated "cheesecake-maxxing". Carl's Jr put an actual sandwich on the menu called the Spicy Chicken Maxx.

The word comes from "looksmaxxing", which grew out of online forums where pick-up artists and self-described incels traded advice on attracting women. The extreme end of that world involves young men hitting their own faces with hammers to change their bone structure, and using methamphetamine to lose weight. This is documented, it is dangerous, and it is the soil the vocabulary grew in.

The trend found a mainstream face in Braden Peters, a 20-year-old who posts as Clavicular. By his own estimate, his cultural run has lasted about seven months. He has launched an app that scores people's facial features and started a ten-city American college tour.

So that is the picture. A word with a difficult history, popularised by one young man over roughly seven months, now attached to hotel bookings and cheesecake.

The numbers everyone walked past

Here is the part that matters, and it was in the same reporting.

American annualised revenue from health and beauty products marketed to men rose 15.3% over the past four years, to $5.7 billion, according to the research firm NielsenIQ. That is more than double the growth of the health and beauty category as a whole. Over the same four years, the average price of a men's care product rose 28.6%.

Men are buying more, and they are paying more per item. Those are two separate findings and both are good news for anyone selling to them.

The chief executive of L'Oréal put the size of the gap plainly on an earnings call.

Read those three bars together. Men already use a quarter of the beauty products sold. They personally buy under a tenth of them, because somebody else does the buying. And they represent half of everyone who could be a customer.

One more data point, because it shows the speed. GlowDrop, a drinkable self-tanner, now takes 5% of its monthly sales from men. Six months ago it was under 1%.

Why you should care

There are two trends in this story, and they run at wildly different speeds. Marketers have been chasing the wrong one.

The vocabulary has months left. A professor of business and society at NYU, quoted in the same reporting, argues that the stampede of big advertisers into "maxxing" is itself the signal that the language has already peaked. Her reasoning is worth following: once a phrase becomes cringe, the creators who built it have to chase something more extreme to keep the algorithm fed. So the word dies and the behaviour underneath it gets worse.

The buying shift has years left. It was running before the slang existed. Dr Squatch was using "smellmaxxing" before Clavicular was famous. Alex Costa moved from posting Call of Duty videos to men's grooming content in 2017, has since worked with Cadillac and Mastercard, and got his own hair-care brand into Target this year.

Put it as plainly as possible. The suffix is a costume. The customer is a customer. Carl's Jr bought the costume.

One of these expires this year. The other one is still buying in 2030.

The risk nobody priced in

Borrowing slang you have not researched creates a specific, predictable problem. A journalist rings, asks whether you knew where the word came from, and "we had no idea" is a weak answer. Journalists are already ringing.

There is a version that survives that phone call. CeraVe posted a TikTok in March that parodied the extreme practices, including the face-hitting, and then sold moisturiser. That is a joke made by people who did the reading. It holds up under questioning precisely because the brand demonstrated it knew exactly what it was referencing.

The founder of a skincare startup called Maxxed Men, who chose the name in 2023 before he knew about the trend, now warns that advertisers pushing the language further into the mainstream may be handing oxygen to the behaviour underneath it. He would like everyone to be more careful with the messaging.

Carl's Jr just liked how the word sounded.

Three things to do this week

Look the word up before you use it. All of it. Search the term plus the word origin, then read the first page of results including the ones you would rather skip. This takes ten minutes. It is the entire defence against the phone call above, and almost nobody does it.

Decide whether you are selling to the joke or the customer. Write it down. If the campaign only works because a word is currently funny, it has a three-month life and no second use. If it works because a group of people started buying something new, you can run it for years and build a product line behind it.

If you sell to men, act on the price finding, not the slang. The average price of a men's care product rose 28.6% in four years. That is permission to sell a better version at a higher price, which is a far more useful piece of information than any suffix. Test one premium product rather than one clever caption.

The slang was free to borrow and it will cost you a news cycle. The shift was sitting in the same article, took four years to build, and nobody had to be clever to notice it.