Which superhero has the best grooming habits?
You may never have considered this, but a couple of ad agencies for skincare have recently teamed up with superheroes to present the idea of male grooming as a manly, bench-pressing activity. And who’s to say it isn’t practical? After a long day in exercising in anything from a leotard to a complete exo-skeleton, even the doughtiest hero will need to cleanse and exfoliate.Take Captain America, for instance. He’s been hired byskin care experts Kiehls to hawk their Advanced Anti-Aging Skin Care For Men For Firming, Lifting, And Anti-Wrinkle with Facial Fuel Heavy Lifting Anti-Aging Moisturizer. Tip #1: One of the keys to skin care is just memorizing the name of the product.
Cap appears in several Kiehls ad and a complete comic, which is available on the website. Tragically, after enduring 14 pages of rather jarring “pan and scan” digital comics, I did not get to see Cap use the moisturizer and discuss its effects. Has he never heard of Makeup Alley? For a woman, no beauty regime is complete without discussing the product’s texture, whether it caused breakouts and if it could possibly be drying.
According to claims on Kiehl’s website, the product improves skin density and fights Sagging—is Sagging one of the new DC villains we haven’t heard about? Skin density would surely help with invulnerability, so this product will probably find a place in the daily skin care regimes of many a superhero.
Skin density will also comes in handy for the next superhero grooming task.
If you’ve been following along with us on the making of Man of Steel you’ve surely seen pictures of Henry Cavill as Shirtless Hobo Tramp Steamer Superman and if you are like The Beat, your first thought upon seeing these pictures is “How does he shave?” The second is “When did Kryptonians get chest hair and how do they shave it off?”
Well, razor blade company Gillette has had the same question. And many answers.
They’ve launched a whole “How Does He Shave?” ad campaign with scientists Mayim Bialek and Bill Nye, Mythbusters Jamie and Adam, and weed philosopher Kevin Smith all weighing in with theories and postulates.
A lot of effort expended, but for naught—you see, the “laser vision/mirror” theory has been fairly well established in the Superman canon:
If there is an issue with superheroes and shaving, surely John Byrne has already thought of it*, and in the comic book Man of Steel, he established this whole mirror heat vision method: Superman holds up a mirror and uses his heat vision to carefully burn the hair right off his face.
So yeah.
Superman being super and all, how his bodily functions function has long been a topic of some fascination, with shaving and how he manages to engage in sexual congress with frail human women perhaps the most popular. If there has been a discussion of Super-poop, we haven’t seen it and so much the better.
While Cap and Supes are all about the grooming, what about the most metrosexual of superheroes, Iron Man? We couldn’t find Tony Stark selling any grooming products, but he does have his own fruit snack: Funky Monkey Invincible Strawberry Bananas, a chewable nutritious treat which includes five servings of fruit in each resealable bag.
* Byrne famously walked off She Hulk when another writer had a scene where she shaves her legs.
Al of these videos go off the right edge of the column and as such only 2/3 of each screen is watchable.
I feel like they should extend this to a handful of comic creators that appear to be either stuck in a time stasis, or actually ageing backwards.
This is one of those things where the true answer to the question is “who the hell cares?” Fandom is guilty of this kind of over analyzing to, some even will judge the quality of the canon based on whether or not something this insignificant has been answered. Remember the convoluted explanation in one 70’s comics about the glasses? Classic case of over-think. I agree with Mark Waid. If the glasses thing bothers you, you are in the wrong genre.
…and you’re right, the comics already went there. Though in the case of Byrne it was not a mirror but a piece of the actual rocket that brought him to Earth (or in this case hyperdrive attached to birthing matrix technobabble yadda yadda),
I agree that Superman shouldn’t be overthought, but the heat vision shaving might be an example of overthinking. There’s no need to think that Superman’s invulnerability is absolute–because it’s not. One can assume that he can shave his facial hair with earthly equipment, just by using a harder metal in the blades and/or using more force.
Sex with fragile humans could be problematic, but again, there’s no need to think that his sperm would injure people because they’re weak, single cells with limited lifespans. It’s actually harder to think that he could have children with humans than to assume that he can’t, because he’s an alien.
SRS
“You may never have considered this, but a couple of ad agencies for skincare have recently teamed up with superheroes to present the idea of male grooming as a manly, bench-pressing activity.”
Did no one else grow up in the 80s and 90s, when almost everything Marvel ever put out had an ad of Oxy pads?
What they really should do is explain how Supermann can get those kind of muscles and abs when nothing is too heavy for him to lift.
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