The thing with personal grooming is it quickly becomes a slippery slope. I used to be like you, a naif, an innocent: I used to wash my face two times a day with an abrasive physical scrub^*. Then I realised I could have more control over my skin with moisturisers, unguents: I realised a way of upgrading myself from a five-out-of-ten to a solid six is to get a special trimmer to do the edging on my beard. And suddenly I went from a bar-of-soap-in-the-shower man to a guy with flannels, with precise and expensive tweezers. A guy who says this: ‘£55 for a moisturiser? Hell fucking yes!’ I have a three-step face washing routine in the morning and a separate, two-step routine at night. They say you do not notice the moment your life changes forever, that you never know you’ve walked through a door you can never go back through until you’ve taken that first step through it. I can. It was the moment I figured out what toner is for.*

The day after I turned 30 I woke up and my eyes were sore and I suppose that is me, now, I am dying, cells are sloughing off me like a train and all that is left now is a long slow crawl to the grave. ‘My eyes hurt,’ I said, to everyone around me, and they all said the same thing: ‘That is because you have been wearing contact lenses day-in, day-out for like ten entire years, dipshit, and also sometimes you slept in them, the contact lenses, like that one night you went out and got shitfaced and woke up on the floor of somebody else’s flat and in front of you was a small shallow dish with water in it, and in that dish were floating your two monthly disposable contact lenses, which you then dipped two fingers into, monstrously, and inserted them back into your eyes so you could go home, which if you phoned up and asked an optician right now “what is the dictionary definition of the exact worst thing you could do to your eyes” they would detail that, they would say that exact scenario, that thing you did, in 2011.’ And to that I said: ‘Huh, maybe you got a point.’

So anyway I bought an eye mask, from Amazon. The eye mask works like this: it is a Robin-from-Batman shaped mask made of two sealed sheaths of plastic, and inside them is some sort of mass of bubble tea-like beads and some clear blue unfreezable gel, and it attached at the back with a strip of velcro, and you keep it in the fridge and it is heaven, it is nirvana.

The first time I used it I did not come to this conclusion, because despite packet advice telling me I needed to keep it in the fridge, I put it in the freezer. There is something about this, some deep impatience in the male brain, the same mechanic that has caused every beer can that ever got put in the freezer and forgotten about and then exploded and then someone (me.) had to clean out all the beer slushie in amongst the frozen peas: the idea that fridge is cold, yes, but freezer is colder, therefore faster. I put the face mask on after a night on the ice-cube shelf. Essentially what I had done at this point is create a machine designed to instantly and for absolutely no reason give me an ice-cream headache.

Anyway, I figured the eye-mask thing out (use fridge! Read instructions!), and now it’s this sort of face-cooling addition to my entire morning routine: ten minutes in the mask while I eat some porridge, sitting still damp from the shower on the edge of my bed. Am I wearing the ice mask right now? Yes. Do I look like a murderer? Also yes. But you have to ask yourself, sometimes: do we not all, in some way, look like murderers? Murderers quite often just look like you, or me. Yes, yes: sometimes you get the odd crazed murderer, the one with eyes going in different directions, tufts of murderer hair, a cold dead smile, &c. But for every three Dahmers you get one Bundy, and that’s the danger. Bundy looked like he had a very undersubscribed liberal arts podcast and he had to read Blue Apron adverts in a flat voice in between stories about women in literature, but instead he did a ton of murders and got annihilated for it. American Psycho did a lot for culture, and a lot for Phil Collins, and it did a lot for eye masks, too: it gave them a rep. I am here to claim that back.

‘Augh,’ my sister says, every morning, when I get up to make tea and wear my electric blue fridge-cold murderer eye mask. ‘Fucking: christ. Can— Jesus.’ And to her I say: this is grooming, now. This is how I groom. After ten minutes in this thing my eye bags puff right out and look baby-smooth all day long. That purple tinge of exhaustion has worn off me. Ten minutes here, in the ice cave, and I can wear contacts all I like (until in ten years, when an optician gravely tells me I have abused my eyes for nigh on two decades now, and if I don’t just switch to glasses my eyes will rot out of my head and I will die). Come over here, to where I am, The Grooming Man. Dive down this slippery ice slope here with me.