Men care more about grooming now than they did five years ago, according to a recently released survey that asked nearly 2,000 men about their grooming habits. But what’s driving this trend exactly?
It used to be that grooming was something most of us believed was just for women, and you’d get looked at sideways if you were a man who cared about it. But that all began to change in the 2000s, and it seems the 2020s have brought another huge shift in perception.
Talker Research and the Just For Men brand of hair dye teamed up to survey 2,000 men aged 25 and older about their grooming habits and found something surprising: 68% said they care more about their appearance than they did five years ago, and 70% said they plan to get help when it comes to slowing down the effects of aging.
If you’re old enough to remember the 2000s, you surely recall the “metrosexual” trend, when it was considered so outre for a man to put “product” in his hair or care about the cut of his jeans that we had to create an entire term for it so that people wouldn’t assume he was — gasp! — gay.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, men caring about grooming has not only been normalized, but it’s also gone to a whole new level that even the “Fab Five” from the original 2000s “Queer Eye” couldn’t have foreseen.
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Talker and Just For Men’s survey revealed that men today don’t just care about grooming; they are shelling out tons of money and even more time maintaining it. The average man in the survey has a seven-step daily grooming routine. Which is nothing compared to most women, surely, but still a fair amount of effort.
And for a majority of men, both the time and the money have drastically increased over the past five years. The time has increased for 56% of men, and 51% are spending more money on their grooming routines today.
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Why? For the reasons you’re likely guessing, social media pressure is chief among them. There’s no denying that standards for what is a “normal” appearance have drastically changed in recent years. Nobody has normal teeth anymore, for starters, having replaced them all with veneers that look like they’re made of ceramic tile. And that’s before we even get into surgery, injections, and GLP-1s.
Social media was the second most-cited reason for caring about grooming at 32%, just behind the influence of their family at 38%. Friends, partners, and celebrities followed at 31%, 27%, and 11%, respectively.
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The answer to what prompted men to care about grooming in the first place is perhaps the most telling part of the survey: Nearly 3 in 5 said signs of aging, like grey hairs and wrinkles, are what prompted them toward new self-care habits, and 62% said they pay very close attention to these signs.
The anxiety is real: 75% said they wish they could slow down aging, and 65% said they wish they could stop going grey. But as anxious as it’s making men, they really, really don’t want to talk about it.
francescoridolfi.com | Rido | Canva Pro
Nearly 40% said they rarely talk about aging or grooming with friends or family, and 16% said they would never do so, citing the stigma around the topic. Which isn’t surprising: There is a reason most men’s grooming products are named after “manly” pursuits and marketed with tongue-in-cheek ads that seem to say, “don’t worry, nobody’s ACTUALLY taking this seriously — that’s for girls.”
Which is not a knock on men caring about this stuff. I’ve been doing clay masks since I was 23. No shade! But it is a discomfiting commentary on how the internet has skewed beauty perceptions. The beauty industry that was once almost exclusively a way to torture women now seems to be getting to all of us. It’s hard to feel like that’s progress.
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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
