The Grooming Guru, alias Lee Kynaston, interviews Simpson about how Top Gun made a generation of young men ‘gay’ and why the Romans knew a thing or two about exfoliation. A snippet:
GG: Many commentators complain that men are ‘becoming more like women’ with their grooming/beauty regimes. What would you say to this?
MS: I think it’s more a case of men no longer tying one hand behind their backs when it comes to the increasingly important business – both in private and public life – of looking good. Happily married Lord Sugar, for example, sometimes seems to display a weakness for an attractive, nicely turned-out male candidate. And of course, more and more bosses are female.
Instead of men becoming ‘more like women’ what we’re seeing is men being less inhibited in their behaviour by worries about what’s ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’. In much the same way that women have been since the feminist revolution of the 1970s. Likewise, ‘male beauty’ is no longer a completely verboten conjugation that has to always be euphemised with ‘male grooming’.
Read Kynaston’s interview in full here.
On the makeup issue: My (Asian) husband discreetly wore makeup in high school, just as he was flexing his gay wings. A straight colleague once wore makeup to hide the ocean of freckles he was cursed with. Let me assure you, if there were a makeup that didn’t look fake, I’d slap it on to cover certain little imperfections that arise with age. You’re right. Male makeup is due for a comeback.
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