asg

Open Sourcerer, Let's Encrypt

Human rights 🏳️‍🌈✊🏾, D&D 🐲, LEGO 🧱, SFF 🚀, and cats 🐱. Opinions are my own, truths are universally acknowledged.

locked alt: @phasmantistes


shel
@shel

The fact that so many men just do not use hair conditioner just really demonstrates how we as a society have failed men :eggbug-pensive:


shel
@shel

I've written about this before but—anecdotally—most [straight] [cisgender] men seem to not even be taught how or why to use

  • Hair conditioner1
  • Body lotion
  • Face lotion
  • Beard oil
  • Aftershave
  • Clothing!! Like well-fitting, clean and in good condition, intentionally thought-out clothing choices!!
  • Chapstick??? like not even chapstick
  • Sometimes they don't even know how to scrub their bodies with soap like they own soap but they don't seem to know how to use it to clean their body and sometimes it's not even body wash it's like dish soap or hand soap or something like what are we doing!!!
  • Like, a comb? Hair brush??

How do you raise a child and just teach them nothing but apply deodorant and brush teeth and call it enough??? And then they grow into unkempt disheveled adults who just do not take care of their hair, skin, nails2, or really even their body in general and don't even know how or why to do so and then they just end up thinking like "Oh yeah other people are so beautiful and attractive but I'm just naturally ugly and there's nothing I can do about it so why bother."

Like, your body is covered in various things made of keratin and keratin needs to be taken care of and moisturized or it gets scratchy and gross and your skin gets all messed up and then like, it all just gets attributed to ~sexual dimorphism~ as if men are biologically predetermined to wear the same old baggy dirty jeans and baggy old dirty hoodie every day of their life because nobody ever taught them how to dress themselves. Or biologically determined to have a messy dry tangled beard, dry flaky itchy scalp, hair like greasy straw, or red irritated dry flaky skin or greasy itchy scalps.

Most of being ~beautiful~ is just putting in a little extra effort into your appearance, mostly to do with your keratin-based body parts but also like, wearing clothes that fit and aren't ugly. I used to neglect my skin care past applying lotion after I shower and just thought oh well other people are just smoother and more doll-like than me. Then I started doing a proper very basic (soooo basic) skin care routine and now I just look so much better every day. It only adds <5 minutes to my morning and nightly routines and it makes such a huge difference. Using hair conditioner adds <5 minutes minutes to the length of your shower. It's just so worth it and it makes people want to be near you and it makes you feel better about yourself when you look in the mirror and it's such a better sensory experience because you aren't itchy all the time or dealing with painful gross pimples and ingrown hairs3.

Sure, some people more naturally fit western beauty standards than others and some people have skin conditions or other things that will get them perceived as "ugly" no matter what they do (I have a particularly nasty one myself! It requires three daily ointments!) but I guarantee you that just giving up entirely on personal grooming is making things so much worse for you than whatever your genetic lottery results were. Especially for men, the bar is low. The entire "metrosexual" craze was like, people freaking out because straight men were sometimes doing the basic amount of personal grooming. Just a basic level of personal grooming will make people go crazy over you—don't even need to get into retinol serums or leave-in hair products. Why don't we just teach guys how to do this stuff when they're adolescents like we do girls. I'm grateful that because I was a gender non-conforming fruity little kid that I got taught some of this stuff before transition but there's still a lot I had to self-teach that resulted in such huge quality-of-life improvements. A well-groomed body is just nicer to exist in even if other people never perceive it or you don't care about their opinions. I love not being itchy.


  1. Anecdotally, the Black men, specifically, who I've met do, usually-but-not-always, at least know how to take care of their hair, at the very least. Cannot say this for other men though! Also it's mostly just hair that's the exception here.

  2. Not even going to get into nail care since even most cishet women don't do full and proper nail care even though your nails and cuticles are also made of keratin and if you do nail care your hands will be sooooo pretty!

  3. Or hangnails! If you do nail care! Omg it's so nice since I started taking care of my nails how I just literally never get hangnails or torn cuticles and don't have to deal with how it makes that finger hurt so bad whenever you use or wash it.


lutz
@lutz

i am mainly reblogging this to say once as a little kid i specifically asked what conditioner was for, because i'd noticed it in various shower caddies but had never been taught to use it myself, and was explicitly told it was for girls. to fully appreciate the consequences of this interaction, you must know that 1) getting haircuts is historically one of the things i procrastinate on the most, and as a teenager unto early adult often went about four or sometimes even five months between haircuts, and 2) my hair grows in so overwhelmingly thickly that about two months in it is like i am sleeping with a football helmet on. okay so now imagining living oh let's estimate 23 years of your life in these circumstances without conditioner


asg
@asg

wait now I gotta worry about fluoride and conditioner in the water???


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @shel's post:

The point of hair conditioner is to rehydrate your hair after you just dried it out with shampoo. The shampoo cannot properly condition your hair because it is drying out your hair which is a natural part of the process of cleaning it. It just can't do both at the same time so it's gonna be either not cleaning your hair or not conditioning it

actually conditioner alone does a decent job of cleaning hair that's a normal level of dirty (the oils dissolve the scalp oils and most of the dead skin is washed away with it), and making a cowash by adding a tiny dab of shampoo to a larger amount of conditioner is a great technique if you need a little more surfactant action! but half and half products just give you meh results on both sides. Too drying and not moisturizing enough.

If you were to use just one thing on your hair it should be just conditioner, it'll be healthier and nicer looking than an N-in-1. If you're using those you're probably not putting any product in your hair that needs to be shampooed out anyway.

For me, it's also a matter of being able to control each step. I can get a shampoo that's good for say, scalp damage, then follow it with a repairing conditioner. Or go with a very moisturizing conditioner after an anti-dandruff shampoo in the dry winters.

Yeah combining body wash with shampoo seems find to me I guess. It probably is either a bit rough on your hair or a bit too expensive and luxurious than you need on the rest of your body. Or both. But it's at least doing the same funciton

in reply to @shel's post:

Well fitting means it fits you well. It's not too tight or too baggy. It just looks comfortable and proportionate to your body. You don't need to wear muscles tees but like, just getting the right size makes a big difference. Men will wear baggy graphic tees and ollllld baggy jeans and think they just have a lumpy body. But if they wore like, a correctly sized button up with clean correctly sized jeans then suddenly people would think they're a fucking model by the standards applied to men. The correct size should never feel tight, but it should not be hanging off of you in folds either. It should be just large enough to feel comfortable and no larger.

Would love to have that but I’m extemely tall and extremely thin, and most of my trips to regular stores end up with, welp, your size is not in stock. I don’t think I’ve owned a pair of pants that fit me nice like, ever.

I can't imagine not combing my hair. Even when I kept it short, I got annoyed when it got tangled a little bit, and now I need to comb it like, 5 times a day just to keep it from being annoying.

I only learned about moisturizer after I started working retail and my skin was at rock bottom with twelve open sores on seven fingers and a bleeding knee, and at no point did I actually cut myself on anything, they just kinda did that, and nobody fucking told me that was messed up and I should use lotion, or if they did they were super polite and mid about it like "ooo, yeah, that sucks, have you tried lotion" and I was thinking I don't need lotion I need an entire vat of Neosporin

To this day I can't fully heal it, I can put lotion on all day long and it will crack again while I am applying lotion all day. I can take someone's recommendations to switch brand and it will help a lot with the roughed up skin from years of this but my fingers will still just explode sometimes. If I exert the most mildest amount of physical labor my fingers will be torn up and have new cracks and at this point I'm so used to it it doesn't even hurt it's just like ugh where's the blood coming from this time

I should yeah, that would be the most reasonable course of action... Unfortunately my brand of "Nobody taught me how to do anything growing up" includes getting healthcare so I KNOW I need a dermatologist and a therapist with trauma and gender specialties and all that and I just don't even try

I looked into finding a dermatologist recently and discovered that, if you are fortunate enough to live near one, ZoomCare clinics sometimes have dermatologists! And you can book an appointment directly with them from their website! Way better than when I had to get a referral from a GP years ago.

Look online for dermatologists in your area and start calling or emailing to briefly describe the problem and get information like costs and set up an exam if possible.

I had to do this with dentists in my 20s because my mom never took me to one and I was experiencing excruciating pain from even room temperature water. Turned out I needed rotten wisdom teeth removed and amalgam fillings in most of my molars. It just took a few calls to find one that accepted my insurance, since if one doesn't they can probably point you to who does.

Don't skimp on healthcare.

Idk if this will help, but is your room humidity really low (e.g. consistently less than 30%)? I had a similar issue with my hands during a week long hotel stay, and I think the primary cause was that the air was incredibly dry inside and cold outside. When I got home it got much better within a week.

get some cheap cotton gloves in bulk and a tin of bag balm (or Aquaphor, Udderly Smooth, straight lanolin if you can afford it, something THICK). At bed time slather up your hands in bag balm and put a clean pair of gloves on. When you wake up you can take them off and wash your hands bc they'll be very greasy. Toss the used gloves in a separate laundry bag, I prefer to wash them on their own bc they need a hot wash but you can do them with other clothes if you like.

The condition of your extremely dry hands will have improved dramatically by the end of the first week.

Also yeah you NEED to see a dermatologist symptoms like that can be because of a fungal infection that needs treatment.

shampooing without conditioning stimulates the scalp to overproduce oils to compensate, making it oily faster. It takes time for the scalp to adjust to a change in routine even if it's a healthier change.

You're probably using the wrong hair care routine. You might be using too much or too heavy a conditioner. If you have very low-porosity hair then using something like a shea butter based conditioner in gonna leave your hair all gunked up and greasy. You want to stick to a very small amount of glycerin-based conditioner and use it only on days when you shampoo (which you should not be doing every day!! No more frequently than every other day!)

Even as a cis woman I never learned anything but the most basic shit and I still have no idea what to look for. I can't even remember to use acne lotion regularly and finding clothes that fit is an expensive pain in the ass. (I dedicated this year's tax refund to it.) I should look up guides I guess.

I have the bonus of trying to find any health products, like shampoo, that I'm not allergic to.

I'm not even a man (tho I'm still waiting on the hrt so I'm arguably close to one in many ways) but I feel like especially the clothing thing is. Very nontrivial, especially when you don't particularly like or want others to perceive your body

For a long time I was using shampoo and conditioner without understanding why or what they actually do. It sucks because outside of talking to your hair dresser or someone else that's knowledgeable about hair care, it's not the easiest thing to look up in a book on your own like you would nutrition or physical exercise. Personal care is just as important!!

Reading through your post and the comments, i am realizing that perhaps this is why my scalp has been itchy regardless of how much dandruff shampoo i've been using. I was using conditioner on and off for a while but i figured it was mostly for the actual hair

You probably don't even have dandruff it's probably just dry skin from over shampooing. I used to think I had terrible dandruff too and then I just tried shampooing less and moisturizing more and my scalp never itches

Some people do have dandruff but a lot of people just have dry skin

This was me for years, I used 2-in-1 dandruff shampoo/conditioner and the resulting dry scalp was prob the cause of my presumed dandruff. Now I use shampoo once or twice a week, conditioner every day or every other day, and an occasional clarifying shampoo, and as long as I stick to my routine I don't have any issues! Took a lot of trial and error to find the shampoos and condit that worked for my curly hair, but it was worth the effort

if you ever do want to get into the nail care i would be very interested. i recently found out oil is important and water weakens them, but i still don't have a great routine and i've got a lot of delamination going on

I never learned how to do most of this despite being taught because aside from the obvious hygiene aspect of cleaning myself and using lotion so my skin isn't literally uncomfortable no one ever really convinced me why I should do things like comb my hair.

It was all taught to me as being about being presentable, and not looking like a wolf man and as autistic child my conclusion was "wow that sure sounds like everyone else's problem. fuck 'em"

No one ever told me that that taking care of myself would make me feel better and now I'm playing catch up.

Untangling hair and not having it be all matted all the time is such a huge sensory difference. In the mornings I feel like I can't think or do anything until I untangle my hair with a comb because it's just so overwhelming how out of my control the hair is.

Like, it's kinda like that thing where you need to brush your dog's fur not just cuz it looks nicer but also because the dog will be more comfortable when their fur isn't matted

in reply to @lutz's post:

i am pretty sure it was my now-wife who was like "oh you have problems with your hair being thick and scratchy? why don't you try conditioner?" and i was like "oh, do they make that for men now?" and it was like she'd been transposed to a zero-gravity field of darkness and very, very distant stars

in reply to @lutz's post:

Feel this very strongly as an amab person... I spent so many years of my life with a combination of "nobody will teach me how to take care of myself beyond the basics" and the perception of "real men don't care about that sort of thing, and if you do people will think you're one of them queers" kept me from doing anything and as a result my skin is still all fucked up from years of that.

PLUS I had bad acne as a teen (no wonder!) and all I did was use horrible harsh products on it for years which means my pores are just terrible all over my face, forever.

Also for people who have scalp issues - you'll see a lot of people talk about not shampooing every day, and while that works for some people, it's not universal - especially if you're like me and have seborrheic dermatitis! I have to wash my hair every 24 hours (with very mild medicated stuff, don't trust fucking head and shoulders) + mild conditioner after or else my scalp gets inflamed and itchy.

I mean it sort of goes hand in hand with a lot of other "born in the 40s-70s" parenting style. I.E. the lack of any sort of style. You went from 1950s-esque, "let dad tell ya how to shave"-esque hands on bonding parenting to sort of just.... nada

lot of Shit to Unpack there that I will keep Squarely in its Cans.