I founded a beauty magazine. I also use 7-in-1 shampoo.
JT is the founder of The HowTo Network — which means, somehow, he’s also the founder of a beauty edition. He owns one (1) skincare product. It claims to do seven things. So he writes from the only angle he’s honestly got: a regular guy with no idea what he’s doing, figuring it out in public — usually wrong first.
— JT
The HowTo Network started as a reaction. Too much of the internet is performance — hacks that don’t survive contact with a real life, advice from people who’ve never had to use it. I wanted the opposite. Guides written by people who’ve actually done the thing, in plain language, with nothing to sell you.
Seven editions — Home, Food, Beauty, Travel, Tech, Family, Finance — and one rule of the house: no how-to you can’t describe to a friend over coffee. Beauty is the one I had no business starting. I still don’t know what a serum actually does. But maybe that’s the point: if the guy with the 7-in-1 can follow it, anyone can.
If we can’t say it plainly, we haven’t earned the right to publish it.— JT · Founder, The HowTo Network
My father did not have a skincare routine. He had a bar of soap. This is an essay about what men were never taught about taking care of themselves — and what’s better, and available, now.
We were given soap and expected to figure out the rest on our own.
Read the essay →Beauty Edition
The first of more — written only when there’s something worth saying.
Let me be clear about what this isn’t. I’m not a beauty expert, a dermatologist, or an esthetician. Until embarrassingly recently I owned exactly one product, and it advertised seven functions. I’m the founder. Nothing I write here is advice — it’s a grown man slowly realizing he’s been doing all of this wrong for about forty years.
But I write on the Beauty side on purpose. Turns out “taking care of yourself” isn’t a vanity thing or a women’s thing — it’s just a thing, and most guys like me never got handed the manual. So I’m reading it out loud as I go. Badly.
So this page isn’t a beat or an archive. It’s a guy who somehow founded a beauty edition trying to work out what a beauty edition is even for. When something actually clicks for me, you’ll find it here.
And if a fellow bar-soap man reads this and upgrades to — I don’t know — two whole products, I’ll consider it a public service. Though honestly? This one’s mostly for me.
If you’ve been running your whole life on one bar of soap — same. But try one new thing this week. Start absurdly small. That’s the entire secret nobody bothered to tell us.