FashBlog.com

By Simon Woodhouse

Mother Nature likes her men to look good. In the animal kingdom, nine times out of ten it's the male of the species who preens, poses and parades his stuff in front of the female. Take the male lion for instance - he looks good and he knows it. But besides being pretty hot, he's not much use for anything else. So if it's the ladies who do all the hunting, parenting and protecting of the territory, why is it the male who's such a poster-boy? It's all about perception. He's got the mane, the body, the air of dignity, so who cares if he's fat, lazy, violent, totally promiscuous and prone to bouts of infanticide. As long as he looks the part, that's all that matters.

As if taking their cue almost directly from the lion, powerful men throughout history have sort to preen, pose and parade their stuff in one form or another. The word cosmetic has its origins in "cosmetae", a Roman term for slaves whose job it was to bathe men in perfume. The ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, the Vikings, and even blokes in the Middle Ages, all used makeup, skin care and elaborate grooming techniques in one form or another. It wasn't until the Victorian era (when fun in general was frowned upon), that male grooming came to be thought of as the devil's work and promptly stigmatized.

Are we now swinging back toward more enlightened times? Possibly, but is that a good thing? When I get up in the morning my daily grooming routine involves shaving, and that's about it. If I grew a beard I wouldn't even have to do that. There's hair in plenty of other places on my body, but for the most part it's hidden, and so can grow wild and rampant safe from the light of day. Perhaps I'll wear shorts in the summer, or take my shirt off at the beach, and then the follicles will see the sun. However, I'm not a gorilla, so what hair I have got isn't going to offend anyone. I've recently become aware of the fact that new urban man, or metrosexual, occasionally has some of his body hair removed in a procedure known as back, sack and crack. I won't go into whereabouts the hair is removed from (the name says it all), but it sounds pretty humiliating. Humiliating and painful, as I also understand waxing involves gluing the hair to strips of paper, and then ripping it out at the root. Women are probably used to this sort of pain; after all they give birth to babies and suffer PMT each month. The worst that happens to me in the name of looking good is occasionally cutting myself whilst shaving. And that's fine by me.

I also believe that these days I'm supposed to moisturize my skin, which means understanding shea butter isn't something you spread on toast, and green tea isn't necessarily for drinking. Then there's exfoliating, which to me sounds like chopping something down in the garden, but is in fact scraping away the dead skin on my face. I can imagine doing this sort of thing does make your skin feel nice, but where will it end? Every now and then I see reports about make-up for men. It's nothing too outlandish, just little bits of very subtle color here and there. And I must admit that on some men it doesn't look too bad, but they're normally good looking, male-model types who don't need it anyway, or who live in the kind of world where it wouldn't be ridiculed.

So is make-up on men a step too far for male grooming? Perhaps Mother Nature will provide the answer. In the same way having a big mane helps the male lion gather his harem; maybe the super-groomed guy will have similar success with the ladies. If that turns out to be the case, I expect waxing, exfoliating and all the rest of it will really take off. More likely though, is the metrosexual will have his moment in the sun, and then the fickle world of fashion will move onto something else. But there will be a residue left behind. Something from the current grooming trend will remain, and even if only to a small degree, your everyday bloke will appear just that little bit more presentable. And that's got to be a good thing.