Beauty products for men? You are kidding right?
Beauty products for men... Hmm! That right there, in my not so humble opinion, is an oxy-moron. I keep saying it over and over in my head and it still sounds wrong. Whenever I say it, my head spins off straight into the bizarre. Our male politicians with lipstick (God forbid) to touts with cutex and your favorite local male mechanic donning mascara and those fake migrated eyebrows that head North and make the owner look constantly surprised. Beauty products for men, Hmmm! I am not against the idea of men looking good or striving to look good but I think they need to coin a different name for it because it just sounds wrong.
This notwithstanding however, there are very many new beauty product lines for men nowadays paraded on shelves of many a supermarket in this country. But that term right there is where the problem starts - using the word beauty while referring to men's products. The first thing that gets into my head is this: they want men to start smelling either sweet or flowery but still look hardcore; sort of a rosy smell with a Viagra twist, or a hardcore criminal with the etiquette of a butler. These new age beauty products for men have given birth to the metro male, a different kind of man who is both sensitive yet still macho.
A metro male is the kind of man who carries some lip gloss with him at all times to keep his lips from looking like a footpath located somewhere on a very dry valley on the Northern frontier district, and that has been torn apart by unforgiving hooves or thirsty camels and fleeing terrorists. He is not your ordinary scratch-privates-in-public kind of man or the more gross pick-nose-and-clean-ears-with-car-keys type. He is a “modern” man, a changed man who carries with him some etiquette. He is a man who treats his hair - and by treating it I don’t mean comb it. I mean subjecting it to torture in the hands of foul smelling chemicals that thoroughly interrogate the hair and find out why it looks like a half-used steel-wool then torture it into believing it is a soft lustrous piece of eye candy that women will fall in love with. Like Drogba’s.
Cosmetic producing companies have realized this and they are moving in for the kill. They have realized women are influencing the man in more ways than they used to and as a result, the metro male has gained in popularity. Days when men were considered brutal creatures that strictly showered against their will during storms are long gone. Days when they would claw meat off the carcass of an animal with their tough dirty nails are behind us. Nowadays, we have lotions, creams and of course lip-gloss for men. Men also go for pedicures and manicures in addition to facials and all manner of pampering activities. Well soon we are going to have a great problem as every beauty product may soon have a "for men" variety. That is where the real fun will begin.
Right now, it’s all fun and games. Men who go for all these things are considered “kind of cute” and celebrated by women for “seeing the light” unlike the rest who are still stuck on the other end of the century flirting with the Y2K bug. The issue to be raised is however simple. Where will the line be drawn? Soon a lot of men will be taking up the “metro” traits and there will be no boundary except the biological build-up of the two different sexes. Queues in the Barber-shops will start reducing as queues in beauty shops grow longer. The entire fabric of society will become a clown outfit for the gods to laugh at and make jokes during festivities.
Society will be in a crisis. The house for example will turn into a drama zone. Simple tasks like changing the bulb will be interrupted by exclamations by the man that his nail polish is yet to dry. Fetching his lady an umbrella in the rain is going to be a pipe dream considering it will ruin his freshly retouched hair. Chivalry will surely become extinct and the gentleman as we know him today will only be found in museums next to dinosaurs and remains of Homo Habilis. And that right there is my fear.
