Tips for men to stay looking young

“The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

A reader asks:

“Timely query: could you please share some beauty tips for male aesthetic upkeep, how you take care of yours, what products you use, and how we can all age graceful and maintain as much of our beauty as possible into our 50s- beyond eating EXTREMELY clean, drinking 1 gallon of water, and exercising 3-5 days a week? Thank you in advance, and even if you choose not to comment on it, thank you all the same.”

My response:

As a brainstorming answer (if not necessarily in order of importance) in how to stay looking physically young as a man, this is my dozen plus one pennies worth.

1)    Eat well.  This doesn’t mean falling into the trap that of a lot of women (and some men) fall flat on their face in by becoming obsessed by reduced calorie intake. A small cream cake will have fewer calories than a drained tin of tuna, but it doesn’t take a doctorate in nutrition to spell out which is the far healthier and the dish that will keep you lean, but not fat mean.  Eat the appropriate foods, with the right macros.  Carrying excess weight is the first way you can start to look older.  That said, overweight people who lose a lot of weight in later life can look older than looking fat (as the wrinkles and lines are more emphasized).  In essence, incorporate a good diet at a young age, and maintain and even improve year on year.

2)    Drink plenty of water.  A gallon seems excessive, but it won’t do you any harm (just makes you piss a lot!).  I’d benchmark more at the minimum of three litres per day, but each individual will have their own requirements depending on their lifestyle.  I’ve found that when my water intake exceeds three litres, excluding very hot days, I go though a phase of losing a bit of lean muscle.  This is why I believe the sweet spot is somewhere between three to three and a half litres per day.

3)    Maintain your stress levels to a sensible level.  I’m not going use this post an A to Z on how to choose your lifestyle choice.  Nevertheless, it doesn’t take more than your two eyes to see that two men of same age – one who has fathered children, been married and struggled to pay the bills and meet spouse/children expectations….versus the man who has taken the lower stress option of none commitment – to see who is looking the significant physically elder.  On a similar theme, the level of stressful roles you take in your professional life will also impact on the way you look later down the line.

4)    Exercise well and regularly.  Whilst I totally agree with the consensus that you can never out train a bad diet, exercise is still vitally important.  Not only will it keep your body figure/profile in check and be beneficial in a cardiovascular sense, but it will psychologically make you feel better about yourself.  I believe the mind in training (and many other aspects in life) supersedes the physical aspect to a large degree, therefore knowing you are putting your body through the rigours manifests to feeling and looking younger.

5)    Limit your alcohol intake and nights out.  In my opinion, a casual drink is not a bad thing.  If the units of alcohol per week are of a negligible level, the detriments of alcohol will be minimal.  I’m also a great believer that every person needs something to look forward to, therefore if you partake in a big night out once every six weeks or couple of months, then the damage to your body and ageing process will be mitigated.  Any more than this ratio – with the high level of bad calories and lack of sleep that alcohol and nights out result in – and it will naturally age you more.

6)    Don’t get involved with the social proof/popular crowd.  I’ll be the first to admit that at a younger age, if only basing on access to the hottest women, belonging to a social proof and popular friendship network is an advantage.  The hottest women are usually located around the most popular and well-known men.  However, over time you realise that this is nothing more than a short term benefit to men, and over a longer term you see these men looking years beyond their birth age.  Abundant parties, drugs, alcohol and late nights bring about a man who has physically aged badly.

7)    Limit natural sun exposure / use sunscreen / eradicate sunbeds.  If the truth be told, I’m probably not the best example when it comes to staying out the natural sun.  Part of my justification has been keeping faith that being mixed race is more forgiving on my skin.  Another substantiation is that sunbathing acts as a stress relief, therefore a negative is partly cancelled out by a positive.  But I’m not going to be a complete hypocrite, and it is only fair to confess I’ve probably spent more time in the sun than I should have.  With all that said, I have by and large always used high factor sun lotion.  I’ve never been on a sunbed in my life. 

8)    Know how to handle women.  As much as we would like to paint a rosier picture of our opposite sex peers, the reality is women cause you stress.  The hotter the woman, the more stress she will likely bring to your life.  Women’s innate character traits that are symbolic with drama, high expectations, game playing, attention seeking with men and, often at a younger age, a lack of loyalty or honesty, constantly keep you wondering where you stand.  If you can adapt a mindset and life delivery where you are the one in control of the relationship, you are the one with options with the opposite sex, and if it all fails then it is no skin off your nose, the stress levels are diminished which over time reduce the physical ageing process.

9)    Moisturize daily.  A man, even at boyhood stage, should introduce twice daily moisturizing into his life.  This should be applied to both face and body.  There are so many moisturizers on the market that I wouldn’t know where to start, but Nivea For Men or a simple cheaper equivalent (for the face) like Palmers Coconut Oil will most likely be just as productive in comparison to far more expensive creams.  The application to body needs little more than a half-decent supermarket brand version.

10) A contemporary, stylish and suitable hairstyle.  This just cannot be understated.  A good hairstyle on a man can knock years off him.  Equally, if you are going thin, the likelihood is shaving it all off will make you look younger than desperately trying to maintain a longer but thinning style.  I’m not a fan of hair transplants.  I’ve yet to see one that makes a man look better, or even much younger, than his prior bald scalp.

11) Dress contemporary, stylish and suitable to the age you look, not the age you are.  Not dissimilar to hairstyle, a man who is 40 but who looks 30 should dress to suit the latter.  There is a lot of criticism out there from women stating men should dress their age, but this is just bitterness on their part due to men having the luxury to look younger.  Equally though, don’t dress younger than you look.  This smacks out signs of desperation in trying too hard to hold onto your youth, and in a full circle way it can make you actually appear older than the age you look. 

12) Don’t get involved in social media.  Is it any wonder why a lot of women who are social media whores – whether checking their Facebook pages every five minutes or posing for Instagram photographs every second day – look older than their birth certificate shows half a dozen years later.  If you spend half your life worrying what other people think of you, how popular you are through fake friend numbers of “likes”, or whether your friend or foe is looking better looking than you or appears more popular, guess what happens?  What happens is you try and feed the habit more the next day, to the point where it becomes an exhausting uphill treadmill that cannot be maintained.  All this adds up to stress, and too much stress ages you on the inside and the outside.  Don’t be a man who falls into this trap.

13) Ensure you have good sleep.  Both in quality and quantity terms, good sleep will keep you looking younger for longer.  In terms of quantity, you should be aiming for at least seven hours, however I believe much more than nine hours is counterproductive and makes you feel more tired than the sweet spot of eight hours. With this in mind, an average of eight hours should be the target.  With respect to quality, whilst it in principle is better to wake up next to a woman because this should be representative to you getting laid, if you do go through a single stage or dry spell, turn this negative into a positive in knowing that for every night you don't literally sleep with a woman, it is a night contributed to looking younger over the long haul.  I've not known many nights when I've slept better with a woman alongside me than without.  The best case scenario is to have sex with her middle evening, then say she needs to (or you need to) leave!

A final thought

So in answer to the reader’s question, apart from some of 7) this is the way I conduct my life in aspiring, and hopefully achieving, to look considerably younger than my years.  If you think about it, all the above is just about cost free.  It certainly isn’t going cost a million dollars, anyway.  What it isn’t nonetheless, is sacrifice free.  The choice consequently then has to be yours depending on which results and end products you desire to accomplish in life.

The reader picks up on a good point in referencing “50s- beyond”.  Don’t get me wrong, men can still look good and much younger than they are in their 50s, however >99% of men will have passed their pinnacle look a good time ago.  This isn’t to say they are less desirable to some women (although it is only correct to say they will be less desirable to most women who are younger than 40), mainly because by the sheer law of average men in their 50s should be more confident, self-assured and financially secure than their 20s, 30s or 40s.  God help them if they are not.  As has been mentioned numerous times on this blog, women place only a minority percentage emphasis on the way a man looks, and a majority percentage emphasis on what men can offer them to improve their (women’s) life and well-being.

If you ask me, most men who look after themselves should, and often do, look most physically attractive in their middle 30s.  The reason most men don’t look their best at this age is because they haven’t looked after themselves, mainly as a by-product of the lifestyle decisions they made (or in some cases what was forced upon them if their female partners contrived the pregnancy).  A small but not insignificant percentage of men can look at their aesthetic best in their late 30s to early 40s.  Come the midlife age of 45, even men who had the blessings to reach the mountain top look in their early 40s will start to show the first signs of speedier ageing.

I’m a great advocate that even as early as their 30^th birthday – an age which most men (including myself at the time) don’t take kindly in reaching – men can visually age at half the rate of time.  In other words, if that 30 year old man looks after himself, when he reaches 36 he will only look three years older than when he turned 30.  This doesn’t by any means implicate that he will look 33, as if he looked 25 when he was 30, he would in fact only look 28 when reaching 36.  The process continues.

Q-tip:

Men looking younger than their age is probably the biggest gripe in a woman’s life.  This irritation is two-fold.  First, they know that a man who has looked after himself when he reaches his 35^th or 40^th birthday can look younger than the majority of women aged 25 or 30 respectively.  Second, the younger a man looks, the more opportunity he holds to secure a significantly (10 years or more) younger woman.  On the basis women generally look out for men who are of a similar age or slightly older, theoretically this consequence would leave a surplus of single women in the market if the case was that most men looked after themselves and looked considerably younger.