The shelf is lying to you
Most men own four products, use three badly, and need approximately one — possibly none at all.
I have been asked to write a piece recommending products, which is awkward, because my honest professional position is that most people should own fewer of them. The grooming aisle has spent two decades convincing men that a routine is a collection. It is not. A routine is a sequence of about three actions, and the number of jars required to perform it is usually one.
Here is the audit I run when a client asks me to look at what they are using. It takes four minutes and it has never once ended with me suggesting they buy more.
The three things that genuinely matter
- A cleanser you use two or three times a week, not daily. Daily shampooing strips sebum your scalp then overproduces to replace, which is how people end up with hair that is greasy by evening and blaming the water.
- One styling product matched to your cut and your finish preference. One. Matte or shine, hold or movement — pick the pair that describes your haircut and stop there.
- Water. Genuinely. Most restyling problems are solved by re-wetting the hair and drying it in the right direction, and no product on earth repairs a bad dry.
Everything beyond that is optional, situational, or marketing. A finishing oil is a real tool if your ends are dry or your hair is long enough to catch light badly. A scalp tonic is a real tool if you have flaking or tightness. Neither is part of a baseline routine, and both are sold as though they were.
The most expensive mistake on a bathroom shelf is not the wrong product. It is four right products used in the wrong order by someone who was never shown.
You are using four times too much
This is the single most common fault I see and it is almost universal. The correct quantity of clay, paste or cream for a short-to-medium cut is a pea. Not a fingertip, not an almond, not the amount that feels satisfying to scoop. A pea. Take that pea and work it between dry palms for a full ten seconds until it goes from opaque to translucent — that step is not optional, because unemulsified product deposits in clumps and immediately looks like product.
Then apply from the back of the head forward, mid-lengths first, roots last. Almost everyone does the reverse: a handful straight onto the front hairline, which loads the most visible section with the most product and leaves the back untouched. It is why so many styled heads look heavy at the front and flat at the crown.
Wet, damp or dry
Product behaviour changes completely with moisture, and the label rarely tells you which state it was formulated for. This is worth memorising because it costs nothing and fixes most disappointments.
- Creams and leave-ins: damp hair. They need water to distribute and will sit in streaks on dry hair.
- Clays and pastes: dry or barely damp. Applied wet they dilute and lose every bit of the structure you paid for.
- Texture powders: bone dry, at the root only. On damp hair they turn to paste, and there is no recovering from that short of a wash.
- Oils: a drop, on dry ends, after everything else. First in the sequence and it flattens the lot.
Beards, briefly
Beard oil is not a growth product, a conditioner, or a cosmetic. It does one thing — it stops the skin under the beard from tightening and flaking, which is the actual cause of most beard itch. Apply it to the skin, not the hair, with the beard pushed against the grain, and use three or four drops rather than the dropper full that the bottle implies. A beard balm does the same job with added hold, and you do not need both.
The wider point is that grooming has been sold as accumulation when it is really a matter of technique. A person with one good clay and a working understanding of how to emulsify it will consistently out-style someone with a shelf of eleven jars. If you want to spend money on your hair, spend it on the cut. The cut is the part that works while you are asleep.
Tomas Reinholt — 19 June 2025
