Behold the beautiful man

With a largely heterosexual male population happy to wear prints and jewellery as well as seek cosmetic treatments, are we becoming a more tolerant, more gender-equal society?

Can a man be ‘beautiful’? Students of English as a foreign language will tell you that the very phrase is taught to be an oxymoron. “A guaranteed ‘fail’ in TOEFL,” as a friend from China had once told me. Men, it is insisted, are handsome; and women beautiful. Implicit also is the centuries-long idea that men are too important to be considered beautiful, too virile to be thought pretty. Beauty, a trifling matter, is the realm of the fairer sex, the weaker sex. This is, of course, an absurd notion.

Beauty and tragedy of the male form

From classical antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond, the raw beauty and tragedy of the male form have found superlative expression — the Riace bronzes, the Belvedere Apollo, and the Davids by Donatello and Michelangelo, to name only a few. Walk into any major museum in the West, and you will find that the male form — cherubic to elfin to full-bodied — was the conduit for the world’s greatest masters to pour their art into. Their female nudes — perhaps because there was a lack of sitters — seem strangely sexless, their embonpoint often seeming like an afterthought stuck on otherwise ‘male’ torsos.

But since around the 19th century, the focus of figurative painting and sculpture has largely been female, so much so that female figure paintings attract higher prices in the art market even — consequences of almost exclusively male purchasing power, and therefore, the dominant ‘male gaze’. There have been artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, George Dureau, and others, who have celebrated male beauty in their photographs, but their art is often relegated to the domain of the subversive. Changing mores since the Victorian times have ensured, among other things, that the idea of male beauty and embellishment could only ever be seen as perverse, immoral, and “the Devil’s work” — antithetical to what history tells us and, indeed, how nature itself has evolved.

Human males — perhaps to attract mates, to show dominance, or as a symbol of power — have long resorted to ornaments as well. Research has shown that even Neanderthals, long pilloried as our brutish cousins, had a taste for jewellery and makeup. Ancient Egyptians took beauty to their graves, as so many tombs and the materials therein attest. Men lined their eyes with dramatic eyeliner to communicate wealth and status; green eye shadow (from malachite) was believed to evoke the gods Horus and Ra, and therefore ward off curses and illnesses.

During religious rituals, priests often anointed statues of gods with scented oils and even applied makeup to them. And of course, the boy king Tutankhamun’s decked-out appearance is as iconic and ubiquitous as the Mona Lisa’s smile. Ancient Greek and Roman men were not as enthusiastic as their Egyptian counterparts about makeup, but the use of rouge and hair dyes was not unheard of. They were, however, partial to a good perfume. Ancient Byzantinians, it seems, had a reputation for being “pleasure-loving dandies,” going so far as to use boys’ urine as hair dyes!

Where the pretty one is the male...

In the natural world, the male is often the pretty one. Classic case: birds.

‘Beauty,’ ‘taste,’ ‘charm,’ ‘appreciate,’ ‘admire,’ and ‘love’ are not words one would normally expect in a dense, discursive text on evolutionary biology. But it is precisely these words about birds, and how matter-of-factly they are used that make The Descent of Man — Charles Darwin’s follow-up to his more popular On the Origin of Species — that much more daring, dangerous even.

In Descent, Darwin argues that beauty is not merely utility shaped by advantage, not just a “handmaiden to natural selection,” but may evolve for its own sake, with nothing more than the goal of being pleasurable to the self and the observer — the female. The male develops staggeringly beautiful ornaments and finesses his presentation and performance… all so the female may enjoy them. “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” Darwin wrote to an American friend, not because he was disgusted by it but because he couldn’t make sense of the origin of this impracticable beauty.

Often, it really is form over function. With this explicitly aesthetic understanding of evolution, Darwin, “a radical despite himself,” places female preferences as a powerful and independent force in the evolution of biological beauty and diversity. The female, with a “taste for the beautiful,” helped create, define, and shape some of the most extreme forms of sexual display in nature. This was, of course, a bridge too far for even the most broad-minded Victorian scientists who had only recently, and hesitantly, bought into natural selection. They baulked at the mere suggestion that “brutes” could possess aesthetic faculties, let alone that female brutes — with their “vicious feminine Caprice” — could be responsible for the evolution of natural beauty.

The great male renunciation

European courts were notorious for their use of (often toxic) makeup. The alabaster look — ghostly white face — that was modish in the Elizabethan era used large quantities of lead-based makeup. Triangles and circles of rouge became markers of aristocracy; aspirational sensibilities ensured that the bourgeoisie and the middle class followed suit. The use of wigs and makeup in aristocracy reached such ludicrous heights that it may have put the kibosh on male embellishment after all.

Upon returning from a Grand Tour of Europe in the 1760s, some young British elite dubbed themselves the Macaronis. They took to such extravagant hairstyles and makeup that they were roundly rejected by even the bourgeois society. By the time it was the dawn of the Victorian Era, however, the stage was all but set for the Great Male Renunciation. Ensured by the then puritanical court and Church, it was a phenomenon that led to men’s clothing and appearance becoming more staid, and makeup being equated with sex work. The conservatism we associate with Victoriana had firmly taken root, and the male ornament, as it were, was put to rest.

It was perhaps also ‘ornament’ that the Victorians took issue with when they declared Indian kings to be vain, effeminate men unfit to rule. India, with its own storied past of male beautification — a land of exquisitely adorned emperors and colourfully anointed gender-bending gods — would reel under the impact of Victorian attitudes about sex, gender, appearance, and morality long after the death of both Queen Victoria and the Raj.

The rise of the selfie generation

Around the world now, things seem to be changing. Slowly and in small increments, it appears Indian men may be breaking free from those clutches.

Perhaps it is the rise of the selfie generation or TikToks/Reels or the all-pervasive Zoom meetings, Indian males, it seems, are caring more and more about how they present themselves.

It was reported that during the lockdown, “sales of grooming products such as beard oils, hair gels, face washes, deodorants, perfumes, and electronic trimmers and clippers increased.” According to Research and Markets, the Indian male grooming market is worth as much as $643 million and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 11% to $1.2 billion by 2024. The global male grooming market is projected to reach around $81.2 billion by then. There has also been an increase in male fashion jewellery sales, and not just the chains and rings that Indian men usually wear. Cosmetic treatments and surgeries sought by men are also on the rise.

Dr Arundathi Nagaraj, an aesthetic dermatologist, says, “The number of men we have seen coming into our clinics for treatments and surgeries has definitely increased over the past three years. Increased awareness from social media has reduced men’s hesitation to seek cosmetic treatments. There is not as much beating around the bush as there used to be before." What are the commonest reasons men visited her and her cosmetic surgeon colleagues? “Acne-scar treatment, pigmentation treatment, hair transplant, liposuction.”

Just nicer-smelling urban men?

It all begs the question — with a largely heterosexual male population unhesitant to wearing prints and seeking cosmetic treatments, and comfortable wearing fashion jewellery, are we becoming a more tolerant, more gender-equal, inclusive society? Could this finally be the dawn of the metrosexual as every year since 1998 has claimed? Not quite.

From existing data and forecasts within the male beauty and personal care (BPC) market, we can see that there has been significant growth in mostly grooming products — beard oils, deodorants, premium fragrances, and haircare. There has been a decrease in the number of razors, blades, and pre-shaves bought, so… more beards.

Male makeup in India is still nascent despite the increased visibility of users on Instagram. And these users come largely from the LGBTQ+ community and the entertainment industry. When I asked a straight male friend who wears jewellery about where he wears them to, he grinned sheepishly and said, “Not everywhere, man! It’s not always safe.” And he didn’t mean thieves. Moreso, trends in male aesthetic surgery globally indicate growth in mostly ‘masculinising’ procedures — squarer jawlines, pectoral implants, and calf implants. A counterintuitive exercise, considering numerous studies have shown that women instead prefer what some researchers call “feminine” facial features in men — a light stubble over a full beard; leaner bodies than muscle-bound.

Even among queer men, ‘masc4masc,’ ‘musc4musc’ are depressingly common requirements on dating apps. If anything, as a society, we are only further solidifying patriarchally determined heteronormative notions of maleness, manhood, and beauty therein. Far from premature declarations that we have finally embraced diverse gender expressions, it’s probably more accurate to say that what we mostly have are some nicer-smelling urban men with better-shaped beards. What else could explain the consistently rising attacks on queer (especially trans) people?

We are a curious country — straight men hold hands on the streets all the time, but queer people are assaulted for doing so. It is a country where the biggest superstar sells men a fairness cream, but an advertisement for lip balm for men masquerades it as cigarettes. The idols we have on-screen are only perpetuating the notion that beauty for men must mean a big body, a big beard, hard hair, a tough exterior, and infinite tolerance for pain. When our standards for male beauty have become so beastly, perhaps it’s the beasts — those delicate beasts with their plumes and tunes — who may yet teach us a thing or two about beauty.

The author is a medical doctor and writer based in Bengaluru and Mumbai. He is VP-Content at a Bengaluru-based media company specialising in podcasts and video content.