A short history of Australian men's grooming

Australian men have always had a grooming culture. It just refused the name. It lived in barber chairs, in pharmacy bags, in a wife’s moisturiser quietly borrowed, in the zinc on a nose at Bondi, and in the Cancer Council jingle that did more for skin than a decade of imported magazines.

This is a short history, not a complete one. It exists so the journal has a memory.

Before the aisle had a "men" shelf

Nineteenth-century newspapers sold hair tonics and skin soaps with the same optimism they sold land. Barbers were the original clinicians: a shave, a comment about the weather, a bottle under the counter. The bush had its own pharmacy — fats, leaves, patience — some of it in living Aboriginal knowledge that cosmetics still quote more fluently than they credit.

Through the twentieth century the official story was soap, a razor, and not making a fuss. The unofficial story was whatever worked after a shift. Tradies and drivers did not wait for a lifestyle brand. They waited for smoko.

Slip, slop, slap, and the public-health turn

In 1981 a seagull in a hat changed the country. The slip-slop-slap campaign, and the work underneath it, made ultraviolet light a civic issue. Hats at school. Shirts at sport. A generation who can still hum the jingle. Melanoma numbers remain a national file, which is why this journal will not treat sunscreen as a beach accessory. Read UV and the daily habit as the descendant of that campaign, written for people who now also sit in air-conditioning.

The 1980s and 1990s still left moisturiser in a gendered corner. Men used it and called it something else: after sun, after shave, "the stuff".

The supermarket becomes a salon

By the 2000s the men’s shelf existed. It was blue, mentholated, and convinced that foam equalled virtue. Some of it was fine. Much of it was body wash with a jawline on the label. Imported magazines taught ten-steps written for other weather.

Against that, a handful of Australian makers tried a different brief: fewer products, local ingredients, a climate that would test a formula anywhere. The original eshu.com.au, live in the Wayback Machine from 2011 with a welcome that still reads cleanly, was one of those attempts. Designed and made here. Kakadu plum and a eucalyptus-citrus-mint that was told to fade. Bottles that sat on their elbow so the last of the cream was not thrown out. A tone that did not lecture. The range later reached American department stores, stumbled, and in time the product company returned under another address. We are not that company. We kept the subject.

Native botanicals, for better and worse

Kakadu plum, tea tree, lemon myrtle, macadamia — the plants were always here. The aisle discovered them in waves. Some waves brought real chemistry. Some brought a mood board. How to read a label is the skill that decade should have taught faster. Respect for source is the skill it still needs.

The last fifteen years

Beards came back. FIFO made travel kits a serious object, which is why we wrote one without the stocking-filler joke. Social media taught men to sand their faces and then wonder why the UV hurt. A pandemic taught everyone about recycled air and hands. Fire summers taught everyone about smoke.

Through it all, the useful advice stayed short. Wash when you are dirty. Moisturise when the air is stealing water. Protect from the sun you can measure. See a doctor when the shelf is guessing. That is the simple regime. It was the 2008 idea. It is the 2026 idea.

Why a journal, not a museum

We could have rebuilt a shop. The domain would have allowed the costume. We rebuilt a paper instead: hubs for climate, botanicals, regime, grooming and field notes. Guest writers are invited under rules that label paid links as sponsored. The voice is still lowercase. The weather is still the editor.

If you want the next chapter, it will be written by people who live here — on the tools, on the oval, in the cabin, in the office under a vent. Write for us if that is you. The history is only useful if it keeps growing skin.

What the magazines never quite said

Imported men's magazines arrived with leather chairs and a climate that had never met a northerly. They were not useless. They taught a generation that a moisturiser was allowed. They also taught a ten-step that assumed a bathroom the size of a small apartment and a UV index that took the winter off. Australian readers did the usual local edit: they took the permission and left the marble.

Pharmacy chains did a quieter, more democratic job. A bland cream next to the sunscreen, a pharmacist who would tell you when a rash was not a moisturiser question, a price that a fourth-year apprentice could pay. That aisle, more than any campaign, is why a simple regime still feels Australian rather than aspirational.

The internet then flattened the difference. A man in Mount Isa could read the same acid schedule as a man in Shoreditch. Some of that was good science travelling cheaply. Some of it was a peeling protocol written for a city that owns umbrellas. The job of a local journal is to keep the useful science and put the weather back in the sentence.

If this history has a moral, it is not nostalgia for a 2008 bottle. It is that the brief was always the continent. Keep writing it. Keep inviting people who live it. The next useful page will not come from a mood board. It will come from a shift, an oval, a cabin, or a chemist who is tired of selling menthol.