We are men and we moisturize

For the last 15 years that I’ve been covering the men’s grooming industry, I’ve watched it both metastasize and wrestle with the alligator of masculinity. Today it’s a billion-dollar industry and growing much faster than its topped-out beauty counterpart. The landscape—the manscape if you will, but don’t—has drastically changed.

I was a little too young to be aware of the metrosexual movement as it happened but certainly grew up in a metrosexual landscape. I first learned of it as a thing through the backlash. In men’s products, I think that was best represented by the emergence of AXE Body Products. I remember an early review of I did for one of their products for The New York Times, something called the AXE Detailer Shower Tool. It was basically a loofah with special plastic molding to make it, I suppose, more easily grabbable by a man’s hand. Latent in the design and marketing, of course, was the idea that a man’s body is a machine—a car, in this case—and his interest in things stops at their utility. Thus it isn’t a sponge. It’s a tool.