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Young artist men in Reykjavik lead distinctly aestheticized lives, guided by the romantic ethos that life should imitate art—what Pierre Bourdieu called the “art of living.” Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Reykjavik art scene between 2019 and 2022, this thesis examines how these young men transform everyday life into a medium of aesthetic expression. I trace the practices through which this ethos takes shape, including cold-water submersion to evoke the sublime, the use of magic mushrooms to connect with nature, and the cultivation of vulnerability as a progressive masculine trait. At the heart of these practices is the highly stylized way they move through their everyday: an artful mode of self-making that blurs the line between irony and sincerity, reality and illusion. I argue that such practices amount to the crafting of Gellian art objects—techniques of enchantment that captivate both self and onlooker, pursued as playful and purposeful ends in themselves. Following Alfred Gell, who theorized art as a means of mediating social agency, I show how these men use enchantment to situate themselves in a heightened state of being while navigating relations of distinction, care, masculinity, creativity, and ecological awareness. This thesis thus asks what a romantic ethos looks like among young men in the contemporary Reykjavik art scene. By ethnographically tracing the expressions, functions, and affects of their aesthetic practices, I propose a theory of the social life of aesthetics that accounts not only for social positioning, but also for the lived experience of enchantment. Situating these perspectives within a broader trend of young men in the Global North adopting aesthetic practices associated with marginalized groups as a way of presenting themselves as progressive, I offer a novel take on the social function of aesthetics. For the men I studied, style was not a superficial façade, as the Bourdieusian adage “more style than substance” suggests, a phrase that continues to echo through critical scholarship on men and masculinities. Instead, style was the substance—a substance that an anthropological analysis of enchantment helps capture.