Meet Oscar Patel, a 20-year-old content creator who has reportedly built a $290,000-a-month business telling young men he can fix their faces using nothing but free techniques he discovered on his own.
No surgery, no fillers, no supplements. Just knowledge that, according to him, most people simply don’t have access to. The catch? Learning that knowledge will cost you $40 a month.
Oscar’s origin story is central to his pitch. He claims that when he was younger, people couldn’t tell if he was a boy or a girl, which led to bullying and social isolation.
Rather than accepting this, he says he spent years rebuilding his face and body using at-home methods, with before-and-after photos as proof.
The problem is that content creator Joseph Everett, who spent 2026 investigating the looksmaxxing space, cross-referenced the carpet design visible in Oscar’s “before” photos and identified the location as the Gaylord National Resort in Maryland, the venue for the 2018 National Spelling Bee.
News coverage from that event confirmed Oscar participated as a seventh grader, placing him at roughly 12 years old, not 16 as he claimed. His so-called transformation, then, wasn’t the result of specialized techniques. It was puberty.
The flagship technique Oscar sells is called thumb pulling, where a person pushes their thumbs into the back of their mouth and presses outward against the roof of the palate. The theory is that this gradually reshapes the jaw and facial structure over time.
Oscar has also claimed this same approach helped him fix his asthma, sleep apnea, crooked teeth, nose symmetry, an overbite, scoliosis, a tilted pelvis, forward head posture, and even his eyesight.
John Mew, the founder of orthotropics and the creator of the mewing practice that looksmaxxing culture draws heavily from, was asked directly about thumb pulling and said the technique is not and never was part of orthotropics. He described it as people trying to make money from marketing a natural process and said that while force can create change, it usually causes harm and doesn’t last. His advice was simply: don’t do it.
To lend credibility to his methods, Oscar referenced interning at two specific institutions in at least ten videos: the Academy of Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy and the Academy of Applied Myofunctional Sciences. Both focus on jaw, mouth, and facial muscle function, lending an air of medical legitimacy to his claims.
But when Everett contacted Samantha Weaver, the director of the AOMT and a founding member of the AAMS, she confirmed that Oscar Patel never interned at either institution.
The before-and-after photos Oscar uses as testimonials don’t hold up well either. Angles shift between photos, subjects change their jaw position, and facial tilt varies enough to make any comparison unreliable.
The community itself, hosted on a subscription platform called School, has reportedly ranged from 1,500 to 8,000 paying members. There are also allegations that Oscar uses AI tools to generate course content and bans members who leave negative feedback.
Perhaps the most fitting detail in the whole story: Oscar was eliminated from the 2018 National Spelling Bee after misspelling the word “roguery,” which the dictionary defines as trickery or fraud.
