sorry for informing everybody here later! the release of my collection of game recs, The Rec Thread, has been delayed to the 22nd - mix of personal life stuff and also giving myself more time/space for the traditional, regular rec thread I do for the steam and other sales from today and onwards. so you can get the pre-order price till midnight of the 21st too!
i'm putting up some additional preview pages here to make up for the delay. thank you for your patience!
Reminder - this can also be done if 2300 4600 people with cohost plus add an extra subscription to their existing plan. So if you're paying $5, and you can go up to $10 or $15, it would help as much as a new subscriber (honestly probably more that a new person when accounting for transaction fees.)
The fact that so many men just do not use hair conditioner just really demonstrates how we as a society have failed men 
I've written about this before but—anecdotally—most [straight] [cisgender] men seem to not even be taught how or why to use
How do you raise a child and just teach them nothing but apply deodorant and brush teeth and call it enough??? And then they grow into unkempt disheveled adults who just do not take care of their hair, skin, nails2, or really even their body in general and don't even know how or why to do so and then they just end up thinking like "Oh yeah other people are so beautiful and attractive but I'm just naturally ugly and there's nothing I can do about it so why bother."
Like, your body is covered in various things made of keratin and keratin needs to be taken care of and moisturized or it gets scratchy and gross and your skin gets all messed up and then like, it all just gets attributed to ~sexual dimorphism~ as if men are biologically predetermined to wear the same old baggy dirty jeans and baggy old dirty hoodie every day of their life because nobody ever taught them how to dress themselves. Or biologically determined to have a messy dry tangled beard, dry flaky itchy scalp, hair like greasy straw, or red irritated dry flaky skin or greasy itchy scalps.
Most of being ~beautiful~ is just putting in a little extra effort into your appearance, mostly to do with your keratin-based body parts but also like, wearing clothes that fit and aren't ugly. I used to neglect my skin care past applying lotion after I shower and just thought oh well other people are just smoother and more doll-like than me. Then I started doing a proper very basic (soooo basic) skin care routine and now I just look so much better every day. It only adds <5 minutes to my morning and nightly routines and it makes such a huge difference. Using hair conditioner adds <5 minutes minutes to the length of your shower. It's just so worth it and it makes people want to be near you and it makes you feel better about yourself when you look in the mirror and it's such a better sensory experience because you aren't itchy all the time or dealing with painful gross pimples and ingrown hairs3.
Sure, some people more naturally fit western beauty standards than others and some people have skin conditions or other things that will get them perceived as "ugly" no matter what they do (I have a particularly nasty one myself! It requires three daily ointments!) but I guarantee you that just giving up entirely on personal grooming is making things so much worse for you than whatever your genetic lottery results were. Especially for men, the bar is low. The entire "metrosexual" craze was like, people freaking out because straight men were sometimes doing the basic amount of personal grooming. Just a basic level of personal grooming will make people go crazy over you—don't even need to get into retinol serums or leave-in hair products. Why don't we just teach guys how to do this stuff when they're adolescents like we do girls. I'm grateful that because I was a gender non-conforming fruity little kid that I got taught some of this stuff before transition but there's still a lot I had to self-teach that resulted in such huge quality-of-life improvements. A well-groomed body is just nicer to exist in even if other people never perceive it or you don't care about their opinions. I love not being itchy.
Anecdotally, the Black men, specifically, who I've met do, usually-but-not-always, at least know how to take care of their hair, at the very least. Cannot say this for other men though! Also it's mostly just hair that's the exception here.
Not even going to get into nail care since even most cishet women don't do full and proper nail care even though your nails and cuticles are also made of keratin and if you do nail care your hands will be sooooo pretty!
Or hangnails! If you do nail care! Omg it's so nice since I started taking care of my nails how I just literally never get hangnails or torn cuticles and don't have to deal with how it makes that finger hurt so bad whenever you use or wash it.
