Unspeakable Manscaping Is More Common Than You Think
By: Jacob Gallagher (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
IF YOU'VE BEEN on YouTube anytime in the last two months, it's quite possible you've been subjected to an ad for Manscaped, a San Diego men's grooming company starring Rob Gronkowski, the lovably doofus-y Tampa Bay Buccaneers tight end, and his partner Camille Kostek. In the teaser the couple, like a crude 2020 version of Nichols and May, swap very unsubtle (and unprintable) puns about Manscaped's $80 "Lawn Mower 3.0," an electric razor specifically designed for pruning a man's nether region.
Manscaped's advertising approach is startlingly direct. Christopher Oldstone-Moore, a professor at Wright State University and the author of "Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair," recently saw a Gronkowski Manscaped promo and said it was the first time he'd seen a product designed for trimming pushed in such a straightforward manner.
The company's name derives from the term "manscaping," a portmanteau once reserved mostly for the more socially acceptable topics of shaving and clipping one's chest, back or underarm hair. As early as 2003, the hosts of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" extolled the virtues of "manscaping" one's chest hair. Since then, that idea has gone mainstream, its popularity fueled in part, said Kristina Vanoosthuyze, the scientific communications director at Gillette, by certain European soccer players who, in the throes of victory, whip off their jerseys to reveal clean-shaven torsos.
" Trimming a very specific region of one's lower half is a far less public topic than David Beckham's glistening waxed chest. "
But trimming a very specific region of one's lower half is a far less public topic than David Beckham's glistening waxed chest. "Men don't stand around the water cooler" and compare notes on that particular form of body hair maintenance, said Paul Tran, the founder and CEO of Manscaped. That sort of timidity doesn't hamper Mr. Tran, whose business plan behooves him to be more open. In an interview he readily relayed the TMI story behind his decision to launch Manscaped, recounting a painful attempt to perform some below-the-belt trimming with a sub-par gadget.
A study published in 2016 in the American Journal of Men's Health found that 50.5% of the men it surveyed "reported regular pubic hair grooming." Yet not all men are comfortable admitting that they maintain down there, whether that's trimming just a bit or waxing everything off. In an interview, Andrew Stablein, research analyst at Euromonitor who follows the grooming industry, confidently began: "It's really not that big of a deal [anymore] to say, oh, I, I trim my…," but he choked on the last word.
While Mr. Stablein struggled to detail the specifics, he noted that the internet has made it a lot easier for men to find heretofore hush-hush grooming information. Brett Bardsley, the male grooming marketing director at Philips, the Amsterdam-based consumer-products giant, said that he and his colleagues have observed far more search interest around trimming the groin area than around trimming one's back or chest which, he added, "are pretty straightforward to groom."
The Philips website features a comprehensive step-by-step guide that is titled "How to Groom your Man Garden." (Step four: "Pull skin taut and shave first with the direction of hair growth and then against.") Gillette's website has a comparable walkthrough with guidance like "Don't push too hard, let your blades do the work, that's what they're designed for." A big part of the messaging around this form of manscaping focuses on allaying men's understandable worries about jamming a shaver into such a sensitive area.
In its ads, which are plastered across YouTube these days, Manscaped heavily touts its Lawn Mower 3.0's "skin safe" ceramic blade, which it claims prevents cuts more successfully than traditional metal blades. Some reviewers online have reported that the razor still managed to slice them. When asked about these complaints, Mr. Tran said the company tests "tirelessly on different scenarios and environments" and factors in "possible human errors, with the aim to reduce the risk of nicks, snags, and cuts."
Andy Cheng, 35, a retail employee in San Diego, Calif., previously trimmed below-the-belt using a traditional, broader, face razor. He found, however, that it "always kind of just brought fear of being so close to the area." Meanwhile, in his experience, most electric trimmers just had "a ridiculously loud sounding motor." He owns a Lawn Mower trimmer now and reports that he's happy with the results. Mr. Cheng believes this niche of grooming should be discussed more openly. "It's still a very taboo thing," he said.
Manscaped seems hellbent on eradicating taboos. On Instagram and Twitter, the brand has partnered with everyone from UFC fighters to drag queens to podcast hosts (some of whom have little more than a few hundred followers) assembling an immense army of digital spokespeople. These micro-influencers either received free product or simply a personalized discount code to share with their followers.
The giveaway strategy might muddle the question of just how many people are actually buying Manscaped products online versus receiving them for free. But it has certainly raised the volume of men publicly admitting that they've done some maintenance on their unmentionables.
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