MAN UP TO MAKE-UP
The beauty industry has discovered a new, ripe-for-growth customer base: men. As definitions of masculinity change for the better, we celebrate the rapid rise of male make-up.
Chanel has just launched its fir st ever male make-up range. Boy de Chanel, the line of thr ee tinting and masking products draws on the company’s expertise in women’s beauty products to, it said: “write the vocabulary of a new personal aesthetic for men”.
Meanwhile the American brand Milk Makeup has placed model, actor and all-r ound It boy Luka Sabbat at the forefront of its make-up campaign. L’Oréal has suggested that men’s make-up counters could be a r eality in its retail network within five years. And in the UK, an online tutorial created bythe fast fashion e-tailer ASOS entitled ‘How to do natural mak e-up for men’ has accumulated over 750,000 views on Facebook. So is men’ smake- up really ab out togo mains tre am?
The signs suggest yes, absolutely. Over the last fe w years,apushforg end erf lui dityacrossthe fashion industryh asse en in numerabl ed esignersandfashi on houses consolidate their collections and r e-evaluate the now outdated stereotypes of the gender binar y. And wherethefashi on industry go es,the be aut yindustry often follows.
In the same way that women feel more comfortable than ever ditching their stilettos for sneak ers, men have for several years allowed themselves to let go of the stigma attached to self-car e and g rooming. Embracing beautification is the natural extension of this pr ocess. Yet there will probably be some of r esistance. For whenever men choose to do something outside of the gendered stereotypes placed upon them, their identity becomes subject to cynical scr utiny: remember the now archaic terms ‘metrosexual’ and ‘spornosexual’?
Still, if the hunch being follo wed by Chanel and L’Oréal isc or rect,the rise ofm al emake- up isallbu ti nevit ab le. The ascent of the male g rooming industry – which was worth close to 50 billion dollar s last year according to Euromonitor – was in par t predicted by Tom Ford, who adamantly told Estée Lauder’s executive group president back in 2013 that tapping into the male beauty market was an essential move for his eponymous beauty brand. And he wasn’t wrong. Today, with independent gender-neutral brands like Jecca and Fluide popping up every week, and beauty g iants like Charlotte Tilbury and MAC (who claim that men r epresent seven per cent of their customer base) cr eating make-up lines entirely dedicated tothe ne ed sandwantsofthe male market, inclusivity has become a non-negotiab le pr inciple. As Chanel noted when unveiling Boy de Chanel: “Beauty is not a matter of gender , it’s matter of style .”