What a 1970 Newsreel Got Right About Men and Facials

There's a British Pathé clip from 1970 floating around YouTube. It's called Beauty Treatment For Men. It runs one minute and eleven seconds. The narrator sounds like he's describing the Battle of Britain — somehow a man getting a facial mask applied becomes a "soothing cruise" the face is setting sail on. The whole thing is played for laughs, but the laugh is at the man's expense, not the treatment's.

Watch it. I'll wait.

The setup is what you'd expect from 1970. A young man, springtime, thoughts turning to — and this is the narrator, not me — "ways by which to impress the equally young members of the opposite sex." His solution is a facial. Steamer, gel mask, infrared massager, post-treatment rubdown. He arrives looking tired and leaves looking, according to the voiceover, "worth looking at" for the beach season ahead.

That's the entire pitch. A facial as a tactical move in a courtship campaign. A grooming protocol dressed up as a hunting strategy. The clinical work in the clip is mostly real — you can see actual steamer, actual mask application, actual facial massage. What's dated isn't the treatment. It's everything wrapped around it.

I didn't know what an esthetician was until I'd been to one

Fifteen years ago I got my first facial. I didn't know what to call the person doing it. The word esthetician hadn't entered my vocabulary. If you'd asked me what I imagined happened in a facial appointment, I would have guessed something halfway between a haircut and a car wash.

I walked out of that appointment and started researching how to do it for a living within the week.

When I enrolled in beauty school, I was the only man in my class. Not one of three. The only one. Every module I sat through, every time the instructor said "you girls," I did a small mental translation in the back of my head — she means me too, she just doesn't have the language for it yet. I've spent thirteen years doing some version of that translation. In product copy. In marketing photos. In trade show booth design. In the way the industry talks about itself, even now.

My friends thought I was joking

When I told my guy friends I was going to esthetician school, they reacted the way you'd expect a group of men in their late twenties to react when one of them announces he's going to professionally touch other people's faces for a living. Which is to say — like the word facial had just been served to them on a silver platter and they were all racing to make the same joke.

That was the cultural temperature in 2013. Facials were one of two things. A woman thing — birthdays, bachelorettes, mother's day. Or a punchline. There was no third category. There was no version of getting a facial that sat on the same shelf as getting a haircut or going to the dentist or hitting the gym — a normal, repeating, unremarkable maintenance thing a grown man does because his skin is an organ that responds to care.

Looking back at the 1970 clip with that context, the strange thing is that 1970 was actually closer to mainstream than 2013 was. The premise of the clip is absurd, sure. But the premise is also: men get facials. The narrator is being a smartass about why this particular man is on the table, but he's not questioning whether the man should be there.

By 2013, even that ironic acknowledgment was gone. Men weren't on the table at all. Men were just the joke.

The shift, in a number I can actually defend

About 70% of my regular clients at Skin Factory are men.

Not men dragged in by a partner. Not men gifted a one-time appointment for Valentine's Day. Not men who show up once before their wedding and disappear for two years. Men who book themselves, on their own calendar, on their own credit card, on a recurring cadence. Men who text me about a retinoid purge. Men who notice when their barrier is off and want to know what to do about it. Men who ask intelligent questions about active ingredients and actually wait for the answer.

This isn't normal, historically. This is genuinely new. And I want to be honest about why I think it happened, because the explanation isn't flattering to my own industry.

It didn't happen because the skincare industry got better at marketing to men. Most of it still hasn't. The dominant marketing language for men in skincare still alternates between "rugged" font choices and "tactical" packaging, neither of which has anything to do with skin. It happened because men, quietly, mostly on their own, decided that taking care of their face was something they were allowed to do. And then they went looking for somebody who could actually do it without making them feel like they'd walked into the wrong store.

I'm not the only esthetician noticing this shift. But I do think solo male-presenting practitioners working on male clients have an outsized role in normalizing it. Men sometimes feel less self-conscious walking into my studio than into a women-coded spa. That's not a flex on my part. It's a structural thing about how the industry presents itself, and I happen to sit in a useful pocket of it.

What 1970 actually got right

If you mute the narrator and just watch the 1970 clip with the eyes of a working esthetician, you'll see a facial. A real one. Cleanse, steam, mask, massage. The equipment is different — I'm not putting clients under an infrared lamp that looks like a Buck Rogers prop — but the bones of the appointment are recognizable across 56 years. A man, on a table, having a professional work on his face.

What 1970 got wrong wasn't the treatment. It was the why.

The entire framing of the clip rests on the assumption that a man would only ever do this to look good for someone else. To compete. To court. To impress. The facial as a romantic strategy, a beach-season pre-game, a tool aimed at someone other than himself.

That's the part that's actually obsolete.

The men I see in 2026 aren't booking facials to impress anyone. They're booking them because their skin itches when their barrier is wrecked. Because they don't like how they look in the iPhone front-facing camera at two in the afternoon. Because they're in their forties and they've started to notice the guys who took care of themselves at thirty are now aging differently than the guys who didn't. Because it actually feels good and they've stopped pretending that feeling good is a feminine concept. Because their dermatologist told them to. Because they read something. Because their barber mentioned it. Because, fifteen years ago, they had one once — and they remembered.

A note about The Archive

This piece is the first in a series I'm building called The Archive — vintage beauty and grooming footage watched with a working esthetician's eyes. Not as nostalgia. As a measuring stick. To clock what we've actually moved past versus what we're still pretending we have.

There's a lot of footage out there. Old British Pathé clips, training films from product companies that don't exist anymore, segments from morning shows in eras when the morning show was the dominant cultural medium. Some of it has aged badly. Some of it is more advanced than what we're doing now. Most of it is somewhere in between.

If you've got a clip you want me to dig into, send it.