Male grooming

Matching your hairstyle with your facial hair is an entirely personal decision, but some combos work better than others. Much like your fashion sense, grooming is an individual choice as to how you want to portray your image. However, we are here to give you a few helpful hints as to what combinations look best.

If something’s good it’s worth singing about, and “express yourself” has been a focal lyric for artists as varied as Madonna, Charles Wright and New Order. The general consensus? Why, self-expression is good for you, of course! We have a chance to stamp our personality on everything we do in our day-to-day lives and in doing so stand out to make the ordinary just a little bit extraordinary.

You may have already met our self-expression heroes, which we found after we combed the globe looking for natural talent. These three guys turn the regular into the irregular with a simple injection of self-expression.

James Sweetman is just like any other London commuter. Almost. These days, every morning at 7:15, James wakes up, gets dressed at his flat in the West London suburb of Ealing, has breakfast, checks his phone, packs his work bags, walks up the road, takes the train to nearby Paddington, opens up his bag, pumps up the inflatable kayak within, throws it in a canal, grabs his foldable paddle, and begins his four mile journey into work.

2011 was a great year for celebrity styles, with John Hamm, Ryan Gosling both giving a great example of how it should be done and then there were also some male celebrity who were shining beacons of how not to groom.

We take a look at some of the worst celebrity grooming mistakes of 2011:

Self-expression belongs to everyone, everywhere. It’s our chance to impose our personalities on the day to day. Recently, we went around the world looking for the very finest examples of everyday self-expression, resulting in our choice of the world’s best self-expression heroes. In the course of this process we also came across some other really impressive people from across the world.

Whether it’s pimping your ride or creating art from bank notes, we found some awesome self-expression in Japan. First up, meet the Dekotora truckers. “Dekotora” is an abbreviation for “decoration truck”, a form of wildly-pimped truck that drivers soup up both on the inside and out with shiny neon, bright paint and extra rigging. It’s as if the Transformer Optimus Prime drove into a Christmas tree.

Grooming guru, cultural history boffin and all round nice guy, Dr Allan Peterkin is our resident self-expression and male grooming expert.

Not only is Allan a psychiatrist and lecturer at the University of Toronto, he is also a prolific scribe on the topic of male grooming and has written ace titles such as ‘1000 Beards – A Cultural History of Facial Hair’ and also ‘The Bearded Gentleman – The Style Guide to Shaving Face’. He’s also into fridge art but ask us about that another time...

Why have men grown (or removed) their facial hair? The answer was fairly simple until the twentieth century. Cavemen really had no choice because shaving hadn’t been invented. From the Neanderthals onward, once a guy hit puberty, something bristly started sprouting on his face. Shaving (or at least plucking hairs out with clam shells) began around 2,000 BCE. Thereafter, whether Egyptian, Greek, Roman, or Judeo-Christian, you had to grow a beard to indicate your religion, class, and allegiance to your kind.

The twentieth century is when things really started to get interesting. After both world wars, men became convinced that clean-shavenness signified godliness, patriotism, and modern life. A male grooming industry was born and razors (both blade and electric) with accompanying foams, tonics and aftershaves became big business.