By 
When I left Melbourne for Southeast Asia at thirty-one, I packed everything I owned into a carry-on bag. Not a metaphor. A literal carry-on, the kind that fits in the overhead locker without negotiation, containing everything I had decided I actually needed to live. What that process revealed, fairly brutally, was the gap between the things I thought I needed and the things that actually mattered when space was the constraint.
Grooming products did not survive the edit well. I had been keeping, in my Melbourne bathroom, the kind of collection that accumulates rather than gets chosen: three or four styling products I used inconsistently, a moisturiser I had picked up because someone recommended it, a toner I used roughly twice before forgetting what it was for, a succession of face washes in various stages of being finished. None of it was the result of a considered decision. It was just what happened when you let a category grow without ever asking whether it was serving you.
Into the bag went a face wash, a moisturiser with SPF, a hair product, a deodorant, and a lip balm, because Ho Chi Minh City is unforgiving to lips that are not prepared for the humidity and the sun. That was the routine, not by philosophy initially but by necessity. What happened next is what made it interesting.
Nothing went wrong
This is the part that is difficult to write about without it sounding anticlimactic, because the honest account of simplifying a grooming routine is that nothing happens. You do not look noticeably worse. Nobody comments. Your skin does not deteriorate. Your hair, which you were probably overthinking anyway, continues to do roughly what hair does.
What did change was the texture of the morning. I live in a small apartment in Binh Thanh District, and my mornings are built around a specific sequence: coffee, twenty minutes of reading before a screen gets opened, then writing from around eight until eleven. That sequence depends on the morning having a certain quality of low friction.
The grooming portion of the morning, which used to involve a series of small decisions about what to use and in what order and whether the current product was actually working, became a five-minute non-event. It was just done, and then I was on to the part of the morning that I actually cared about.
That is the thing that the grooming industry has a structural interest in you not realising: the decision load of a complicated routine is not just about time. It is about cognitive overhead. Every product in a routine is a small ongoing consideration.
Does it need replacing? Is it doing what it was supposed to do? Should I try something different? Multiply that across eight or ten products and the category starts taking up more mental space than it deserves, given that its job is simply to get you out of the bathroom looking presentable.
What the five products actually are and why
I am aware that this kind of article has a tendency to become a list of expensive alternatives, which would rather defeat the purpose. The products I use are not premium. They are not particularly special. They are products that do their job without requiring ongoing attention, which is the only criterion that actually matters once you have stripped the category back to its function.
The face wash is a gentle one without fragrance, used morning and night. Saigon is hot and humid for most of the year, and anything heavier than a simple cleanser feels like an unnecessary complication in that climate. The moisturiser has SPF built in because applying sunscreen separately is one of those steps that disappears the moment the morning is rushed, and in a city where you are often outside on a motorbike in direct sun, that step cannot disappear. One product handles both jobs.
The hair product is a light paste that works on slightly damp hair and does not require refinement beyond that. I wear essentially the same hairstyle every day by design. Consistent hair, like a consistent wardrobe, is a decision made once rather than repeated daily. The deodorant is unscented. The lip balm is the kind that comes in a small tin and costs very little and lasts for months.
That is genuinely the whole list. The selection process was not sophisticated. It was elimination of everything that was not clearly earning its place.
The wardrobe principle applied to the bathroom
I came to minimalism in clothing before I applied it to grooming, and the logic transferred directly. My daily uniform in Saigon is plain t-shirts in neutral colours, one pair of jeans or chinos depending on where I am going, clean sneakers, and a light jacket when the occasion calls for one.
I own multiples of the same items. When something wears out, I replace it with the same thing. The decision about what to wear in the morning has been made in advance, permanently, and does not require any daily engagement.
Grooming, once I looked at it through the same lens, was just another category where the default had been accumulation rather than curation. The question was the same one I had applied to clothes: what does this category actually need to do, and what is the minimum number of things that allows it to do that? The answer was simpler than I expected, as it usually is when you ask the question directly instead of letting the market answer it for you.
The men’s grooming industry, like the men’s fashion industry, has a significant financial interest in making the category feel more complex than it is. Complexity drives consumption. If you believe that your skincare routine requires seven steps and that each step has a specific product formulated for it, you will spend considerably more money and considerably more mental energy on the category than if you believe, as I do, that the goal is to look clean and appropriately put together with the minimum number of reliable products that achieve that outcome.
What simplifying this category actually changed
I have been living in Saigon for nearly four years now, and the routine has not changed materially from what I packed into that carry-on in Melbourne. I have occasionally tried a different face wash when the previous one ran out and the same one was not available. I have replaced the hair product once with something slightly different. Neither event produced any particular consequence.
What I have not done is expand the routine back toward what it was. Partly because there is no obvious reason to. Partly because the question I ask before adding anything to any category, whether it is clothes or books or commitments, is whether the thing is earning the space it takes up. Bathroom space is finite. Morning cognitive space is finite. A product that does not clearly justify its occupation of both does not get added.
The seven-step skincare routine, the grooming subscription box, the serum that targets three different concerns simultaneously: these exist in a market built on the idea that more engagement with the category is better. My experience has been the opposite. Less engagement with the category is better, because the category’s job is to get done and get out of the way, leaving the morning for the things that the morning is actually for.
The writing happens between eight and eleven. The coffee is ready by six-thirty. The grooming is finished before either of those things, and I do not think about it again until the following morning. That is, as far as I can tell, exactly what a grooming routine should do.