There was a time not so long ago when one didn’t talk about men’s skin care. It was the equivalent of Fight Club for cosmetics. Back in those days, the homosexual community, always on the cutting edge of advancing men’s fashion, was were you went to find any man willing to invest time in taking care of his skin. Your average guy had nothing to do with the stuff.

Along came Ben Affleck and an assortment of other media-proclaimed “metrosexuals” and, suddenly, skin care for men became a bit more main-stream (along with hair treatment, facials, manicures and the like). Again, not the standard fare of your average guy. You didn’t sit around with your buddies chugging beer while watching the Bears and talk about what kind of skin care product you were using.

As I write this, we’re more than half way through 2009 and things have changed. Oh, don’t get me wrong, you still won’t find most of us sitting around talking about skin care while cheering on our favorite team, but it is also no longer a subject reserved strictly for minority groups like the gay community, Hollywood elite or desperate, acne sufferers. Skin care for men as become more main stream and accepted than ever before. Why the shift?

One could argue, perhaps, that we’ve evolved beyond outdated male stereotypes and are simply a smarter gender than before, but I think that’s giving us more credit than we deserve. I’m more inclined to think that the overwhelming evidence of accumulated sun damage plays a part in our putting the health of our skin ahead of our fragile male egos. After years of basking in the Sun’s rays at the beach and the prematurely aged faces we see staring back at us in the mirror, we finally “get it.”

Further compounding matters is a very competitive job market. With fewer jobs to support hungry would-be employees, older workers are finding themselves in fierce competition for jobs with younger candidates. It would be nice to believe we live in a country where silly biases favoring the young and healthy don’t exist, but that’s just not the case. More than ever before in recent memory, simply looking younger and healthier is actually an important weapon in your job-search arsenal. You could fairly say that the economy has done wonders to promote the virtues of men’s skin care.

Whether your motivation is vanity, improved self confidence, apparent age reduction, fighting wrinkles, protecting your skin from the sun, protecting your skin from pollution or just the urge to take better care of yourself, it is perfectly acceptable to find a few skin care products in a man’s medicine cabinet beyond those designed for acne or other medical conditions. In other words, guys, it’s ok to want to look better or to want to feel better about your appearance.

I bring this up because I think it’s important for us to get beyond those lingering hang-ups and to make the promise that we won’t be neglecting a male audience as we transition into a blog full of health, beauty and skin care product reviews. Though the majority of the topics covered will be for women’s products (simply by virtue of there being so many more of them to review) our male readers will find ample advice and suggestions here to meet their needs as well. We hope you’ll check back soon as we get underway.