The Shala Daily

Men are buying serums. In a recent piece for StudyFinds, Jordan Foster notices something odd: young men are spending real money on skincare, grooming routines, body sculpting — the whole apparatus — but they won’t call it beauty. They’ll call it optimization. Maintenance. Self-care, maybe. Just not beauty.

The language matters because it reveals the bind. Beauty has been gendered for so long that even when men participate fully in its rituals, they need a different vocabulary to feel safe doing it. The result is a kind of cultural doublespeak: elaborate ten-step routines that are definitely not beauty routines, medical procedures that are definitely not cosmetic, hours spent on appearance that are definitely not vanity.

Meanwhile, the market doesn’t care what you call it. It just wants you to buy the next thing.

🪞 The Practice and the Trap

There’s something genuinely good about tending to your body. Washing your face with attention. Noticing tension in your jaw. Moving in ways that make you feel alive in your skin. This kind of care — embodied, curious, gentle — can be a form of mindfulness. It can build dignity.

But appearance culture has a way of turning care into compulsion. The routine that started as a way to feel present becomes a way to manage anxiety. The mirror becomes a site of inventory rather than recognition. You’re no longer tending to yourself; you’re trying to fix yourself into an ever-narrowing ideal that keeps moving just out of reach.

Foster’s piece walks this line carefully. The problem isn’t grooming. The problem is when grooming becomes a mask for shame, when every ritual is compensatory, when you can’t look at your face without mentally cataloging what needs correcting.

The Stoics had a word for this: phantasia. The impression that lands on you before you’ve decided what to do with it. You see your reflection. An impression arises — “too tired,” “not enough,” “wrong somehow.” The practice is learning to notice that impression without immediately believing it or acting on it. To pause between the seeing and the fixing.

🧘 A Small Experiment

Try this: stand in front of a mirror for sixty seconds. Put your hands on your heart. Breathe slowly, the way you would if you were trying to calm a friend.

Without judgment — and this is the hard part — notice one detail you genuinely appreciate. Not something you’ve decided you should appreciate, but something that actually registers as good. A line that tells a story. Calm in the eyes. The angle of your jaw. The fact that this body has carried you this far.

Say thank you to that one thing. Out loud if you can.

Then choose one small, nourishing action for the week. A gentler moisturizer. Five minutes of facial massage. A posture break every hour. Something that feels like tending rather than fixing.

Track how it shifts your felt sense over seven days. Not whether you look different, but whether you feel more at home.

🎯 The Question Underneath

The real question Foster’s piece raises is this: how do we keep the tenderness of grooming without becoming captive to a market that profits from our doubt?

Maybe the answer is simpler than we think. Name the practice. Notice its purpose. When grooming is a practiced, loving boundary — a way to feel present rather than acceptable — it sustains you. When it’s an attempt to erase discomfort through external fixes, it never will.

The Buddha talked about the middle way between indulgence and self-mortification. Neither ignoring the body nor obsessing over it. Just tending to it with the same steady attention you’d give a garden: noticing what’s there, offering what’s needed, letting the rest be.

Men can get pretty. Men can tend to their skin and their posture and their presence. They can call it beauty if they want, or not. What matters is whether the ritual brings you closer to yourself or further away. Whether you’re practicing care or practicing escape.