A few weeks ago, I caught myself watching a YouTube tutorial on the ‘perfect skincare routine for men.’ The creator was methodical, precise, talking about serums and essences like they were engineering solutions. And then I thought: when did taking care of your skin become about performing masculinity in a specific way?
This is where my designer brain kicks in. As someone who thinks about how products and culture shape human behaviour, I’ve been fascinated—and honestly, a bit frustrated—by the way we talk about male grooming. The narrative around men’s beauty standards often swings between two extremes: either it’s this revolutionary moment of breaking free from rigid masculinity, or it’s something shallow and vain. Both miss the point entirely.
What we’re really looking at is a design problem. Not in the sense of product design, though that’s part of it. I mean the systems, messages, and expectations we’ve designed around how men should look and present themselves. And those systems are creaking under pressure because they don’t match how real people actually live.
The Grooming Industry Got the Brief Wrong
Let me be blunt: the boom in male grooming products and services wasn’t driven by men waking up one day and deciding they all wanted hairless chests. It was manufactured. Marketing teams identified a gap—men’s insecurity about appearance—and built an entire market around it. Sound familiar? It’s the exact playbook used on women for decades.
What’s interesting from a UX perspective is that this industry solved the wrong problem. They looked at men and said, ‘You should look different,’ rather than asking, ‘What do men actually want to feel?’ Those are completely different questions with completely different answers.
A guy might want to feel confident. To feel clean. To feel like he’s taking care of himself. Those are human needs. But instead of solving for those, the grooming industry gave us a prescriptive checklist: trim your beard this way, remove hair there, buy this cream, that toner, this serum. It’s complexity masquerading as self-care.
The Real Issue Isn’t Hair—It’s Choice
Here’s what actually matters, and I think this gets lost in conversations about male beauty standards: people should feel free to groom however they want without it being a statement about their masculinity or their desirability.
Some men love grooming. Some spend an hour on their skincare routine and feel genuinely good about it. That’s valid. Other men splash water on their face and call it a day. Also valid. The problem arises when men feel pressured to do something specific because they’re anxious about how they’ll be perceived.
This connects to something I think about a lot in design: the difference between creating an option and creating an expectation. When you design a feature, you’re not just adding functionality. You’re making a statement about what people should do. And if that statement doesn’t align with what people actually need, you’ve created friction in their lives.
The grooming industry created an expectation without understanding the human need underneath. They sold a solution to a problem nobody was asking them to solve. That’s bad design, full stop.
What Actually Matters in Attraction (Spoiler: It’s Not Hairlessness)
Can I say something that might sound controversial? Most people don’t care as much about how hairless you are as the grooming industry would have you believe. What people actually respond to is confidence, kindness, humour, intelligence, effort. Those things matter.
Does that mean appearance doesn’t matter at all? No. Of course it does. We’re visual creatures. But there’s a massive difference between caring about appearance and needing to conform to a very specific aesthetic that’s been sold to you by people trying to make money.
Think about what draws you to someone. I’m betting it’s rarely ‘he has exactly the right amount of chest hair for 2024.’ It’s usually about how they make you feel. How they carry themselves. Whether they seem comfortable in their own skin. And you know what helps someone feel comfortable? Not spending two hours a week worrying whether they match a grooming standard that has nothing to do with their actual life.
Designing for Real Life, Not Instagram
The best design doesn’t ask people to change themselves to fit the design. It meets people where they are and gives them tools to live better. That’s what actually good grooming products and routines do. They solve a real problem—maybe your skin is dry, or you get ingrown hairs, or you just like how a particular product smells.
But the moment a grooming choice becomes about meeting someone else’s standard? It’s no longer about self-care. It’s about performing for an audience. And that’s exhausting for anyone.
I think what’s happening now is that men are beginning to experience what women have dealt with forever: the constant pressure to meet moving goalposts of beauty standards. The frustrating part is that we already know this game doesn’t work. We already know that optimizing your appearance to please others is a never-ending treadmill that leaves everyone feeling empty.
The solution isn’t to swing the pendulum the other way—to shame men who care about grooming or to suggest that any level of personal care is somehow un-masculine. That just trades one bad design system for another.
The real solution is to let people make choices based on what makes them feel good, without the anxiety that comes from meeting external standards. Grooming should be a simple, practical thing that fits into your life. Not a performance. Not a statement. Just… grooming.
Laura Bennett
James Holloway
Tom Harrington