Gone are the days when the most attention a man paid to his appearance was a regular haircut and a daily shave. But now male grooming is fast catching up with women’s beauty as men have started to take a lot more care of their appearance.
While women once had a monopoly on anti-ageing creams and potions to banish those telltale lines and wrinkles, now men are happy to fork out on grooming products and treatments to give them younger-looking skin and a fresh-faced look.
A recent survey in the UK revealed that a quarter of men go for grooming and beauty treatments more than once a fortnight. Those treatments include the likes of facials, massages and manicures. Waxing, once the painful preserve of women, is also rising in popularity among men – a third of those quizzed in the survey said they had had hair removed from their groin area, a practice dubbed “manscaping”.
And where once the stereotypical scene had the impatient man waiting for his wife to get ready for a night out, the survey revealed that the average man now spends up to an hour getting himself perfectly groomed when he’s going out.
The giants of the cosmetics world are leading the way in catering for this upturn in male grooming with men-only products from the likes of L’Oreal, Yves Saint Laurent and Dermalogica on the shelves.
And as women have been doing for decades, men are now seeking out “miracle” products for those fine lines that are a dead giveaway of ageing. Manotox is one such product. Made by Nip+Fab, this is a firming moisturiser that promises to get rid of wrinkles without surgery or injections.
Its ingredients include liftonin, a natural active ingredient complex that is said to combat skin ageing, and gransil, a collection of sea minerals that smooth the skin and freshen up the complexion.