There was a time when men's grooming was easy to understand.

You bought a razor because you shaved. You bought deodorant because you sweated. Maybe there was a bottle of cologne reserved for weddings, dates, and the occasional promotion. The medicine cabinet was functional, almost apologetic. Grooming was maintenance.

Somewhere along the way, men started treating themselves more like athletes.

Not professional athletes. Just people attempting to keep pace with increasingly demanding lives. A morning lift before work. A twelve-hour day. Dinner downtown. A red-eye flight. A run club on Saturday. Another meeting. Another coffee. Another reason to look like you've slept eight hours when you've barely managed six.

The products have followed.

This month, Onside, a personal care company backed by Jayson Tatum and Jude Bellingham, landed at Target. At first glance, it looks like another celebrity adjacency play. Another athlete lending credibility to another shelf of body wash. But the branding feels noticeably different.

For years, the men's category oscillated between two poles: hypermasculine drugstore products wrapped in matte black packaging, and skincare routines imported wholesale from women's beauty. One side asked men to smell like cedarwood and motor oil. The other handed them ten serums and expected compliance.

Neither quite captured how most men actually live.

Most men don't wake up wondering how to optimize their skin barrier. They do, however, want to feel put together. They want products that make it easier to move from one version of themselves to another without thinking too much about it.

The best brands seem to understand this.

They aren't asking men to become beauty enthusiasts. They're acknowledging that modern masculinity increasingly resembles a collection of systems: training, eating well, sleeping better, dressing intentionally, smelling good, recovering faster, staying hydrated, and generally appearing as though life isn't winning.

Perhaps that's why athletes have become such effective ambassadors. Not because consumers believe they can look like Jayson Tatum, but because athletes embody ritual. They prepare. They recover. They repeat. Their value isn't aspiration as much as demonstration.

The next decade of men's grooming may have less to do with vanity than readiness.

Ready for a meeting.

Ready for a workout.

Ready for a flight.

Ready to walk into a room without appearing like you've spent the last three days answering emails under fluorescent lights.

The medicine cabinet, it turns out, might be evolving into something closer to a locker.