Grooming

Most men will never build a skincare routine. Here is what they do instead.

Two bottles, about ninety seconds, and no interest in the word routine.

Updated August 28, 2026 · 9 minute read

There is a version of this article that starts by telling you your skin is in trouble. This is not that version, because that is not why men buy skincare, and it is definitely not why they keep buying it.

Here is what actually happens. A man sees a photograph of himself that somebody else took, in bad light, at the end of a long day. He does not think old. He thinks tired. He looks a beat more worn than he feels. Then he does nothing about it, because the obvious next step is a routine, and a routine sounds like a project.

That refusal gets treated as laziness. It is not. It is a fair reading of the offer. Walk into the skincare aisle and the pitch is a system: cleanser, toner, serum, essence, day cream, night cream, mask, an order of application, a schedule. Nobody promises the man a result. They promise him a hobby.

So the useful question is not how to get men to care more. It is much narrower, and much more answerable. What is the shortest thing you can do that actually changes how your face reads? Not the ideal version. The floor.

That question has a real answer, and it is smaller than the aisle wants you to believe.

01  The refusal

The problem was never the products. It was the word.

Ask men who use Brickell why they started and the answers are almost aggressively plain. They are not describing a transformation. They are describing something they stopped having to think about.

A quality anti aging cream, that i use. Nothing fancy, just the basics. Keeps it simple. Tim T., verified buyer, June 5, 2026, on the Revitalizing Anti-Aging Cream

Face care routine is a breeze. Wash when you wake and repeat when you go to bed. Leaves you feeling nice and fresh. Javier T., verified buyer, June 4, 2024, on the Daily Essential Face Care Routine I

Those are not the words of men who took up a hobby. Wash when you wake, repeat when you go to bed. That is the whole protocol, described by somebody doing it, and it attaches to two things he was already doing anyway.

This is the part the category keeps getting wrong. The barrier was never vanity or interest. It was the size of the ask. A ten step regimen fails for the same reason a ten exercise warmup fails: not because it is wrong, because nobody does it twice.

Healthy, sharp, less tired, without thinking about it. That is the actual brief. Everything else in this article is an attempt to meet it in as few steps as possible.

02  The diagnosis

What "tired" actually is, on a face

Tired is not one thing, which is why generic advice bounces off it. It is three separate, visible, fixable things happening in three different places. Once you can name them you can stop buying products at random.

The order matters more than most men expect. Number three is the fastest, the cheapest and the most visible from a distance. Number one is the one other people comment on. Number two is the slowest and the only one that really needs patience.

So a sane sequence is not cleanser, toner, serum, essence. It is: fix the surface, then fix the eyes, then think about lines. Two products, then a third, then maybe a fourth. Anything more is optional, forever.

03  The floor

Two products. Once in the morning, once at night.

This is the part that gets skipped in favour of something more interesting, so here it is flatly. The floor of men's skincare is a cleanser and a moisturizer. Everything else is an upgrade on that base, and none of it works as well without it.

Brickell sells the two of them as one item, which is a useful tell about what they actually expect a first time buyer to do. The Men's Daily Essential Face Care Routine I is the 8 oz Clarifying Gel Face Wash and the 4 oz Daily Essential Face Moisturizer, together, for $48. Bought separately those two cost $25 and $35, so the pair saves you twelve dollars and, more usefully, removes a decision.

Steps quoted from the directions published on the Clarifying Gel Face Wash and Daily Essential Face Moisturizer product pages.

Read that grid again and notice what is missing. No order to memorise. No waiting between layers. No decision about which product goes where, because there are only two and one of them is obviously first. The whole thing is four events a day, all of which happen while you are standing at a sink you were standing at anyway.

Men who describe this pair in reviews keep reaching for the same two words, which are simple and clean, and they say them as though they were the point rather than a consolation.

"Doesn't leave my face greasy" comes up so often in Brickell's reviews that it is worth treating as a spec rather than a compliment. A moisturizer that leaves a film is a moisturizer a man stops using in week two, and no amount of ingredient quality survives that.

Try the floor before you buy it Brickell's 8 piece Best Sellers Sample Kit is free, you cover shipping 04  The formulation

Men's skin is a different substrate, and it gets shaved

The phrase "for men" on a bottle is usually a colour scheme. Sometimes it is not, and the difference is worth understanding before you decide it is all the same soap.

Brickell's own account of why the company exists is unusually specific on this point. It was founded in 2014 out of an apartment in Brickell, Miami, by two co-founders with backgrounds in engineering and manufacturing, and their stated goal was a line "tailored to men's thicker, tougher, more porous skin". They then built a production facility in their home state of Maine, which is where the products are still made.

That last variable is the one nobody mentions. A man who shaves is running a mild exfoliation across his own face on a schedule, and then asking that skin to recover before he does it again. It is why the same face can be oily and irritated at once, and why a cleanser that strips it makes both worse.

The face scrub sits exactly on this seam, which is why it is the one optional product worth arguing about early. Brickell's directions are two to four times a week, before shaving, and the reason they give is mechanical rather than cosmetic: it clears the surface and lifts ingrown hairs so the blade has less to fight.

05  The third product

If you add one thing, other people will notice this one

Here is the honest hierarchy. The cleanser and moisturizer change how your face feels and, over a few weeks, how the surface reads. The eye cream is the one that changes what people say to you, because the eye area is where a stranger reads fatigue in the first second of looking at you.

It is also the one Brickell has the most published feedback on. The Restoring Eye Cream carries a 4.82 average from 1,535 reviews, the largest review count in the range.

The application instruction is worth reading closely, because it is the step men get wrong. Not a smear across the lid. The tip of the index finger, a small amount, below and around the eye, and out onto the upper cheekbone. Twice a day, morning and evening, on the same trips to the sink you are already making.

Nine years on one product is not a testimonial about a formula. It is evidence about the size of the ask. Nobody sustains a chore for nine years.

06  The night step

The one thing worth doing that has no daytime equivalent

Retinol is the only ingredient in this article that men tend to have heard of before they hear of the brand, and it is also the one with a real usage rule attached, so it belongs after the floor rather than inside it.

Brickell's Retinol Face Moisturizer Cream is a 2 oz unscented night cream at $40. Their directions are short: massage a small amount onto dry, cleansed skin. Their honesty about tolerance is shorter still, and it is the sentence that should decide whether you buy it. If irritation or flakiness occurs, they write, reduce usage to a few times a week. Their own answer to the sensitive skin question is to start at one or two nights a week.

That is the whole addition: one more thing, at night, on a face you were already washing. It does not restructure the routine because there is barely a routine to restructure.

If retinol does not appeal, the Revitalizing Anti-Aging Cream is the alternative night step at the same price, built around DMAE, MSM and hyaluronic acid rather than vitamin A, and it carries 1,300 published reviews at a 4.75 average. Their directions place it on the forehead, around the eyes, and on any area with set lines.

07  The bill

What the whole thing actually costs

Prices are the part every article like this leaves vague, so here is the entire shortlist with sizes, published prices, and the review record attached to each one.

Prices, sizes, averages and review counts as published on brickellmensproducts.com on August 28, 2026. Table scrolls sideways on a phone.

Three tiers fall out of that, and they are worth naming because most men overbuy on the first order and then abandon the surplus.

• The floor, $48. Wash and moisturizer as one item. Nothing to decide, nothing to sequence.
• The floor plus the eye cream, $88. The version other people comment on.
• Everything above, $202. Six products, most of which last months. The scrub is used two to four times a week, the eye cream is half an ounce.

Start with the free kit instead Eight of these products in trial sizes, plus a $10 coupon toward the first order 08  The objections

The five reasons men give, and what the labels actually say

09  The company

Made in Maine, since 2014

It is a small brand by the standards of the shelf it competes on, and the biography is short enough to check. Two co-founders, an apartment in Miami's Brickell neighbourhood, a name taken from the street, and a decision to move manufacturing to Maine because that is where they were from and where they knew how to build things.

• Manufactured in South Portland, Maine, at 167 Rumery Street, which is also the address on their own site footer.
• Run on 100 percent renewable energy, with a stated monthly consumption of 12,000 kWh offset through local wind, hydro and tidal projects.
• USA made with globally sourced ingredients, per the badge that appears on their product pages.
• Organic ingredients starred on the label. The moisturizer panel marks aloe, rooibos, jojoba, green tea, white tea and white willow bark as organic.

The press record is the other checkable part, and Brickell keeps it on a page of its own.

• Rolling Stone, February 2025Named Brickell the best organic skincare brand, citing the natural formulas.
• Men's Health, September 2024Put the Revitalizing Anti-Aging Cream in the 20 Best Anti-Aging Products for Men in 2024, tested by skincare experts.
• Men's Journal, June 2024Three products took 2024 Grooming Awards: Best Conditioner for Beginners, Best Affordable Shampoo, and Best Aftershave with Natural Ingredients.
• Business Insider, January 2024Listed Brickell among the best affordable skincare brands, with a note on the Purifying Charcoal Face Wash.

Awards and citations as listed on brickellmensproducts.com/pages/press.

10  The start

How to test all of this without deciding anything

The argument of this article is that the barrier is the size of the commitment, not the price and not the interest. Which means the sensible first step is the one that commits to nothing at all.

Brickell gives away an eight piece Best Sellers Sample Kit. It is listed at $0.00 on their site, you cover the shipping, and it comes with a $10 coupon toward a first purchase. It is trial sizes of the products above, which is exactly the right format for a question that is really about whether you will keep doing it, not whether the formula works.

Two weeks is enough to answer the only question that matters. Not whether your skin improved, which takes longer than that, but whether you did it four times a day without resenting it. If you did, buy the $48 pair and stop reading articles like this one. If you did not, you have lost the price of postage and learned something true about yourself.

Get the free 8 piece kit $0.00 on brickellmensproducts.com, you cover shipping, includes a $10 coupon

Every price, size, rating, review count, ingredient description and company figure on this page is reproduced from brickellmensproducts.com as published on August 28, 2026, and may have changed since. Reviews are quoted from the brand's own public review widget and belong to their authors.