Vain Glorious: A shameless guide for men who want to look their best

I’ve finally come to realise that how I look and dress is part of a lifetime’s ambition to (unrealistically) make everything in my world appear and feel perfect.

the boring

Esquire magazine recently published a piece about men’s make-up, renaming the products and treatments as “guyliner”, “menscara” or “menicures”

A hectic and emotionally disruptive childhood – my mother married four rather peculiar men in quick succession (one ran away, one was carted away, one passed away and the other we just told to piss off) – forced me, at a young age, into the role of peacemaker. My fall-back position: let’s pretend everything’s alright. So, quick, tidy the sitting ro

wrote an essay called “In Praise of Artifice”

According to the Collins English dictionary, a vain person is one who takes “an extreme pride in their own beauty, intelligence, or other good qualities”.

The men’s personal-care market, as it’s known in the business (understandably everyone’s trying to avoid using the word “grooming” these days), has been predicted by Allied Market Research to be worth $166b by 2022.

Other problems arose, too. There was a study published on the National Library of Medicine’s website in 2018 that claimed “bearded men harbour a significantly higher burden of microbes and more human-pathogenic strains than dogs”. Basically, men’s beards have more bacteria than dog fur. In response, Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease doctor with J