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| Approved by the King of Monochrome himself |
Venture into the men's grooming section of a typical store and you will find that the vast majority of men's skin and hair care products are packaged with the same sober, manly colors: gunmetal grey, bleak black and minimalist white with the occasional daring forays into colors such as navy blue and Chernobyl orange, the latter two colors suggestive of the ruggedly manly endeavors of military service and donning a radiation suit to heroically battle through clouds of radioactive smoke respectively. Contrast this to the women's grooming section, where you will find near-identical products packaged in a much broader and vibrant spectrum of colors ranging from delicate pastels to vivid jewel tones. Indeed, somewhere along the passage of time, the culturally normative ideal of masculinity in the Western world has shifted from the colorfully bewigged, ruffled and powdered aristos of old world Europe (think Louis XIV, or perhaps the Swiss Guard) to the comparatively far more drab dudebro-type creature today. This is perhaps indicative of how far we as a species have diverged from our animal kin, as it is the males of the animal kingdom that tend towards biological ornamentation (e.g. the peacock vs. the peahen). Exactly how and why this shift has occurred is best left as a subject for another blog, but what I'd always enjoyed about figure skating was the fact that it was a rare exception to the contemporary sea of male drabness, where a man could wear something like this on a mainstream international public broadcast and still be taken (somewhat) seriously:
