You went through my bathroom cabinet, Michael

On Saturday, while everybody else was on the porch, you opened the cabinet in the guest bathroom and counted what was standing in it. One thing. Then you brought it up at the table that night, and what you actually asked was not what the bottle was. You asked why there was only one.

What I said was: simple, effective. Both words are true and neither one was any use to you, because a man who has been doing something since his fifties has stopped having a story about it. He has a habit. A habit said out loud between the main course and the coffee sounds like nothing at all, which is why you laughed and put your napkin back.

So here is the long version, in writing, once, because a table is the wrong room for it and you were never going to ask me a second time.

The count was the right question

You have a shelf of your own. I saw it at Kiawah four summers ago and it was magnificent: a dozen containers standing shoulder to shoulder, three of them for the hair, two of those with the lids off. You did not buy twelve solutions that summer. You bought one solution twelve times, because not one of the first eleven ever told you whether it was doing anything, and a man who cannot tell buys another one.

A dozen bottles is not a routine. It is a dozen guesses, kept in a row, in case one of them turns out to have been right.

The row gets longer for exactly one reason: nobody ever named the part that decides anything. So everything gets attended to, in order, forever, and the attending becomes the point. That is the part I want to take off your hands, and it is worth more to you than the bottle is.

The one part still being decided tonight

Everything in that row goes onto the hair, and the hair is the half of this that is already over. By the time a strand is long enough to comb, every decision about what it is made of was taken months ago, underneath, and nothing worked along its length goes back and changes any of them. There is exactly one surface on a man’s head where anything is still open tonight, and it is the skin the hair comes out of.

That is the whole argument and I am not going to dress it up. One bottle can stand where twelve stood, not because it does twelve jobs, but because eleven of them were never the job.

What is in it, since you will ask

Nine ingredients, all nine printed on the label, and the list is short enough to read standing up in a bathroom. Jojoba is not a fat at all, it is a wax ester, which makes it the nearest thing on that label to what the skin is already putting out by itself, so the blend goes in rather than sitting on top of it. Castor is the heavy one and holds where it is put for hours. Batana, coconut, olive and avocado are the body of it. Rosemary and peppermint are the cool minute you feel, and what that minute announces is the application, not anything else. The vitamin E keeps the blend from turning. That is the nine, and there is no tenth arriving next month.

About a millilitre on damp hair after the shower, worked into the skin under it for two or three minutes, three to five times a week. Some men leave it in daily and the label allows for that; I have never bothered. No cap, no order to follow, no second product waiting to be bought later. If what you wanted was a ritual you can be seen performing, this is going to disappoint you.

The drawer where your last one ended up

You have quit one of these before. Everybody has, and the sentence is always the same: he could not tell whether it was doing anything, so after a while he stopped buying it. That is a fair reason to quit and it is the one thing an oil owes you an honest answer about.

So: the surface comes first, and the surface is quick. More shine, more softness, better body. Those tend to show somewhere between the fourth and the sixth week, which is early enough to know that something is going on and far too early to be a topic at anybody’s dinner. Anything tied to the pace hair is made at moves at the pace hair is made at, and no oil shortens that.

Which puts most of those 90 days on the deciding side of the line instead of the waiting side, and the bottle stays in your cabinet either way. You will notice that is the exact opposite of how the rest of that row got onto your shelf.

Two men who put it shorter than I have

“The guy at the club asked what I was doing differently. I said nothing. That’s the review.”

Peter L., 63

“My wife noticed before I did, which is how I know it’s working. She said I looked rested, and I’ve learned over the years that when she uses that word about my face, it’s about the hair. I’ve been through a few products over the years that promised the world and delivered a brochure. This one just keeps doing its job.”

Charles B., 55

What you were actually asking me

You did not ask about hair, and I have sat at enough of those tables to know it. You asked because a man whose age the whole table gets wrong is doing something the rest of them are not, and there is exactly one civilised way to find out what: open his cabinet while he is outside, count what is in there, and raise it over dinner as a joke.

The answer is one bottle, three to five times a week, since my fifties. It is expensive, and that has never once been the interesting half of the sentence. What the bottle is asked to do is keep what is already there in condition, which is a smaller promise than anything else you own and the only one I have ever seen kept.

Nobody at that table would have put me within fifteen years of my own age, and you have watched what those fifteen years are worth in a room.