In the beginning, it was just his jawline.
Gabriel Dridi says he was 13 when he became obsessed with improving his looks, and 15 or 16 when he started doing facial exercises he’d learned about in YouTube videos that promised to give him a more contoured face.
A few years later, he started “bone smashing”—another technique he’d learned online, which involved hitting himself in the face with a hammer, one minute in each place every day, in an effort to create microfractures in his jawline and cheekbones. The bones were supposed to get bigger as they healed, giving him a more chiseled look.
“I got a permanent swelling,” he told me “But it looked good.”
Next step? Getting taller, with Maasai jumps. Named for a tribe of towering East African herders, the exercise involves rapidly jumping in place, the way someone might on a trampoline, but there is no trampoline, only the cold hard ground. The idea, similar to bone smashing, is that doing this will create tiny fractures in the bones that, once healed, would be bigger. And yes, he told me, it hurt every time he walked, but it made him taller, so he doesn’t regret it.
The only thing the 25-year-old Swedish influencer does regret is the time he injected the bottom of his heels with hyaluronic acid to make himself taller. “It basically created a big, like, round thing about my heels,” Dridi explained in a thick Nordic accent. From what I could gather, the treatment was like implanting high-heels into the sole of your foot. “I was walking on my tippy toes a bit.”
And the results didn’t even last. “When you walk every day, with all the pressure from the ground, the filler gets flatter. I didn’t want to keep injecting myself with filler all the time just to get some extra inches.”
