The Father's Day Essay
What Nobody Told Us About Taking Care of Ourselves
We were given soap and expected to figure out the rest on our own.
My father did not have a skincare routine.
He had a bar of soap. Possibly the same brand his father used. He used it on his face without a second thought for sixty-something years and somewhere in his fifties his skin looked like he'd spent those decades outdoors, which he had, and he was not particularly bothered by it.
He was also never in pain from his skin. Never had a rash, a reaction, a dermatologist concern that I knew of. He ate reasonably well, drank water, slept when he could, and kept moving. That was the whole program.
I want to be honest with you: his approach probably worked better than most men give it credit for.
But it also left me — and most men of my generation — with no framework whatsoever for thinking about how to take care of ourselves. Not just skin. Everything. The body, the face, the daily maintenance that women have been doing for decades as a matter of course and that men have been told, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, was not their territory.
We were given soap and expected to figure out the rest on our own.
Most of us didn't figure out much.
This is a Father's Day piece, which means I'm writing to two people at once: the man whose father didn't teach him this stuff, and the father who maybe hasn't taught his own kids. Both of those people might be you. They're both me.
Here is what I know now that I wish someone had told me earlier:
Taking care of your skin is not vanity. It is maintenance.
Taking care of your skin is not vanity. It is maintenance. The same way you maintain a vehicle — not because you're precious about it, but because the alternative is watching something deteriorate faster than it needs to. Your skin is the largest organ in your body and it is exposed to the world every day. It responds to what you do and don't do. That's not a skincare-industry talking point. That's biology.
The basics are not complicated. Cleanser in the morning. Moisturizer with SPF. Cleanser at night. Moisturizer again. That's it. You don't need a twelve-step routine. You don't need products with unpronounceable ingredients. You need three things done consistently and you need to actually do them.
The basics are not complicated
Morning
Night
The SPF part is the one most men skip and it's the most important one. Sun damage is cumulative. Your father's face, if he spent time outdoors without protection, is showing you a preview of where your face goes without intervention. That is not a criticism of your father. He didn't know. Nobody told him.
You know now.
The other thing nobody told us — and this one goes deeper than skincare — is that taking care of yourself physically is not separate from everything else. How you sleep, how you move, what you eat, whether you drink enough water, whether you're running on stress hormones most of the day — all of that shows up on your face eventually. All of it shows up in your body. All of it compounds.
Our fathers' generation had a specific relationship with self-neglect.
It was almost a point of pride. You worked hard, you took what the work gave you, you didn't make a fuss. The body was a vehicle for getting the job done, not something you tended to carefully. Rest was weakness. Pain was character-building. The doctor was for when something was actually broken.
I understand that posture. I inherited a version of it.
I also understand that a lot of men from that generation paid for it. Physically. With their health, their energy, years they might have had if they'd started paying a little more attention a little sooner.
If you are a father reading this: you have a chance to pass something different forward. Not by lecturing your kids about sunscreen — they'll tune that out — but by modeling it. By actually taking care of yourself where they can see it. By treating your body like something worth maintaining rather than something to be used up.
If you are someone whose father didn't model any of this: you're starting from scratch, and that's fine. Starting from scratch is still starting. The damage from the years you didn't take care of yourself is real but most of it is not irreversible. You can build the habit now.
The bar of soap approach served its time.
There's something better available.
Use it.