“What does it mean to be a man …”, asks Herzog, the eponymous hero of Saul Bellow’s seminal novel—a question beneath generations of male anxiety, and, similarly, a foundational problem of the skin care industry; it should be dispensed, I think, by a single construct—gender is not monolithic.

To ask the question, “Why are there so few quality skin care options for males?” is to surrender to the same ghosts of masculinity still wafting amongst the hops and barley of the the neighborhood sports pubs, as though a single drop of sunflower oil could drain the Eastwood from even the most untamed Clint.

This is of course nonsense. No evidence supports that men and women have different skin care needs.

Nevertheless, too many brands are tempted by the noise, and as a result, the men’s section of the skin care aisle is filled with products more suitable for Clint’s horse than his face.

The paradox therefore is this: The cause of the lack of quality skin care options for men, is indeed the desire for male skin care options in the first place.

So what hope do we have?

If one man’s concept of maleness is in the rugged back country adventure and another prefers a night about town dressed in Victorian lace, our hope can be found in the one thing that unites the two archetypes: their differences. My thesis is that there is unity in those differences. We no more need to redefine the masculine archetype with an image of Harry Styles than we need to reject his masculinity in favor of the Brandos and McQueens of yesteryear. If we instead view masculinity as an individual experience, we can dispense with the rigidity of the definitions all together. This creates an ever expanding pool of individuals from whose experiences we can draw a collective understanding.