GQ // I Started Using These Six Products After Stealing Them From Girlfriends. Now They're Part of My Regular Routine

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I Started Using These Six Products After Stealing Them From Girlfriends. Now They're Part of My Regular Routine

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My ex-girlfriend used to say that leaving things at my apartment was her way of marking her territory. (Which, in hindsight, maybe should have been a red flag.) It was usually just random clutter—easy enough to ignore, but annoying that that it took up space in my already cramped Brooklyn studio. But it was this habit of hers that first introduced me to the wonderful world of women’s skincare.

The inaugural product for me was the small abandoned tube of Glossier’s “Balm Dotcom” that I found wedged in the crevices of my couch. I wouldn’t have gone out to buy a super glossy lip balm, but of course the day came when I lost my tube of male-coded chapstick, and I found myself chapped and staring down the squeezable pink Glossier tube.

I smoothed a bit of the rose-scented balm onto my lips, and it was instantly clear that this was the sort of lip-care experience I had spent my whole life deprived of. That pink tube became my go-to, holding its own for an entire brutal New York winter, a season that usually left my lips cracking practically audibly.It’s a small thing, but I had never had a lip balm this impressive. This made me question the point of gendered products in general: we’ve all got skin and hair, lips and teeth, right? Do men really need a separate lip moisturizer or any kind of separate moisturizer? You know the stuff I’m talking about: macho branding, “FOR MEN,” maybe smells like wood or tobacco, and often just not as good. Are dry lips supposed to be a guy thing? I’ll pass.

Look, at this point we all know the meaning of masculinity is rapidly changing, that gender is an extremely mutable concept. Popping into Sephora to re-up my eye cream hardly counts as a revolution these days. And men's grooming is slowly but finally moving past its infant years of nightmarish all-in-one products. But after taking notes from the medicine cabinets of some of the women I’ve loved, I’m convinced there’s still a lot of work to do. They’re keeping the good stuff from us. I’ve finally opened my third-eye—it may or may not be wearing mascara.