“A woman should wear fragrance wherever she expects to be kissed”-Coco Chanel
Laura Reynolds looks at some of the cheapest beauty products available
Last week I did a lot of complaining about how much effort women are expected to put in to looking presentable in sunny weather. It didn't seem fair that women are sold a lifestyle in magazines that requires them to feel bad about themselves and then subject themselves to a time-consuming beauty regime to recover their self-esteem. But then I started watching Geordie Shore (yes, I know it's terrible and the people on it seem to be indefinably subhuman, but I love it, so there.) Less than a minute into the first episode, one of the boys, Jay, tells the camera that his "biggest fear is getting wrinkles". He also freely admits to getting his eyebrows (and other parts of his body) waxed regularly. Less than 10 seconds later Charlotte says that she's never kissed anyone without a six-pack, and James tells us that "you've gotta have a tan" This is shortly followed up by plenty of shots of the boys working out in the gym and anxiously checking their hair in the mirror.
The girls, on the other hand, seem a lot more relaxed about how they look, with Sophie dismissing her weight by saying "it's just a bit of extra cushion for the pushin'" (any ideas about what that might mean on a postcard please).
The men frequently wear tops that show off their cleavages more than the girls do, and this is clearly a world in which men have equal anxiety about how they look to the opposite sex as women do, if not more. But this obsession with male grooming isn't just limited to the Geordie Shore housemates. While Gary regularly puts Veet on his chest to keep it baby-smooth, proclaiming that the hair removal cream is "the best thing ever invented", anyone who's ever watched The Only Way is Essex will also have seen Mark Wright shaving his chest in the shower. Arg gets much more harassment about his weight than plump Gemma in the show, and don't even get me started on the boys from Made in Chelsea.
Alright, so all of my information's coming from a self-selecting bunch of reality TV show celebrity wannabes, but male beauty products really have started to take off in the last few years, with hair dye in particular being marketed to image-conscious men, as well as "guyliner" and "manscara". Whereas a few years ago men taking this much time and effort over their appearance would have been branded homosexual, ever since David Beckham donned that sarong the traditional rules surrounding male and female beauty have been put into question by well-groomed, heterosexual men who aren't ashamed to use products that were previously the sole province of women.
This can only be a good thing. After years of women being encouraged to go to extreme lengths to make themselves look nice to acquire a man, some of the pressure is now going the other way, with men feeling a similar need to keep themselves looking good. Whilst of course it's wrong to force members of either sex into beauty regimes that they wouldn't normally adopt simply to impress others, it's good that the lines are between genders are starting to blur, hopefully leading to a society in the near future where men and women have access to the same beauty products, and neither will be expected to be better groomed than the other.
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