The Grooming Edit: What I Kept, What I Cut

I did a bathroom audit last year. Not the kind that Instagram would have you do — not an aesthetic restock or a minimalist rebrand — just an honest reckoning with what was in the cabinet and whether it was earning its place there.

The findings: I had nine products I used regularly and eleven products I owned with intentions. The eleven were not helping me. Several of them had been open for more than a year without being finished, which is, if you think about it, a fairly clear data point.

What stayed: the cleanser that does not strip. The SPF, non-negotiable. The moisturiser. A lip balm that I lose and replace every few months. A single fragrance that I have worn long enough to think of as mine. The beard oil that works. A well-made toothbrush.

What left: the three different serums I had been rotating without a clear theory about why. The face mask I used perhaps four times in two years. The hair product that was fine but not necessary. The expensive eye cream that may well be the same thing as the moisturiser.

The cabinet, now, is easier. I do not stand in front of it making decisions. I do the same things in the same order and I am done in ten minutes and I look, if anything, better than I did when the cabinet was full of possibility.

Possibility, I have found, is often the enemy of consistency. And consistency, in grooming as in most things, is where results actually come from. The most consistent result I have seen in any domain — more reliable than any product — is from drinking enough water. Unglamorous, but worth mentioning here because the skin improvement was real.

The one thing I kept that was not strictly functional was a fragrance — for reasons that felt indulgent and turned out to be quite sensible. That is a longer conversation, and I wrote about it in On Fragrance: The Invisible Detail That Changes Everything.