Gentlemen, take heart, for you too are worth it. Yes, you too deserve the privilege of being able to waste your hard-earned cash on chemicals to slap on your prehistorically sagging skin. Adverts for men's grooming products have sprung up in magazines and on television. Promoting L'Oreal's Men Expert skincare range, they coo conspiratorially to women: "What he thinks are great lines, you think are premature wrinkles." A smirking, cutesy guy smiles out of the ads, the lens zooming in on his forehead and eye crease-lines.
The marketing differs subtly from that used for women's unguents. The product is not a moisturiser but a "wrinkle de-crease" or "anti-expression" cream. It contains things like Boswelox and Active Defence System, the type of scientific-sounding but meaningless names so familiar to women, and designed to make you feel that you are buying into an authentic medical miracle.
Today's men have to decide whether they are metrosexual (straight but secretly interested in supposedly "gay" concepts such as style), faux-mo-sexual (straight but openly aspiring to have gay taste) or, God forbid, retrosexual (Neanderthal and unreconstructed). But even the most retro will not be spared the grooming onslaught. The boom sector will be "hair coverage", less poetically known as balding cures. L'Oreal has a range called Vive for Men, which comprises hair-thickening shampoo and thickening and grooming foam and gel - all designed for that awkward moment when "your scalp starts to show through your hair". Hair coverage is, I fear, the new cellulite.
Look to America to see where this is headed. Male grooming there is worth $5.5bn: only 25 per cent of the women's beauty market, the marketing men will insist. Last month, Procter & Gamble bought out Gillette, making it the US sector leader. A company spokesperson beamed that men were "the missing piece in the puzzle" and that as it had conquered the beauty sector for "all [other] members of a household, from babies to women to pets", it was now men's turn. At £685m, the British market is not far behind, growing by 20 per cent over the past five years.
Yet a healthy number of British men still admit they don't like being clean. A report last year revealed one in ten do not wash themselves or brush their teeth daily; a third don't use deodorant regularly. My own favourites are the 9 per cent who want a product to inhibit beard growth. Let's hope they rise up in their stinking, bristling masses and resist Boswe-lox, which, as any woman will tell you, is just not worth it.
