In a new column for Highsnobiety, writer Sable Yong explores how the culture of beauty impacts our lives.
There’s this John Waters quote that gets a lot of lip service: “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” He later amended this: “If they have books in their bathroom, not only don’t fuck ’em…run,” Waters told W in 2020. “It’s really disgusting to go into someone’s bathroom and see a basket of old Us magazines lying there.”
I don’t know how Waters feels about e-readers. But if we somehow found ourselves in the same bathroom discussing his pronouncement, I might suggest that he cast his eyes away from the dusty basket in the corner full of wrinkled reading material and toward the item hanging right above the sink: the medicine cabinet.
These days, we leave so many clues in our digital wake that true mystery is hard to come by. And certain demographics (22-year-old girls in situationships) are more adept at getting to the bottom of people’s business through their Instagram stories than your average deep-sea submersible. To me, though, there’s only one way to get a glimpse of someone’s true, unvarnished self. It’s been said before, but I have it on good authority that people — myself included — are still engaging in good, old-fashioned medicine-cabinet snooping.
The contents of our most accessible bathroom fixture say a lot about our psychopathology — and leave plenty of room for speculation. There’s a reason it has become a jokey content trend to examine “boy rooms” through an anthropological lens. Staged or not, the “rating the bathroom of the guy I’m hooking up with” videos had their viral moment on TikTok. So did the “someone cooked here” audio clip, which is used to imply that men who own skincare products must have come by them through a woman. (This is known colloquially as “the girlfriend effect.”) The burgeoning men’s beauty industry and general consumer “taste” apparatus has worked to ensure that men get inflated kudos for owning personal products that each have their own function, as opposed to a 5-in-1 vat of cleaning goo. (Alternatively, a lack of any hygienic accoutrement in a bathroom helps answer the internal question: “Will I be sleeping here tonight?”)
But snooping through a guy’s medicine cabinet is never more tantalizing than when you’re trying to piece together a more complex picture of who he is. As someone who has “cooked here” many a time (I leave exes’ medicine cabinets much better stocked as a rule), I’ve often thought about the impact of my little souvenirs. How have the bottles of Necessaire body wash, Hairstory New Wash, Soft Services body lotion, and Dieux moisturizer contributed to the self-image of a man versed in modern grooming? And how might they have baffled those who came after me: “Wait, but then why does he only own one pair of jeans then?” I’ve made peace with whatever happens to the Dr. Jart Cicapair moisturizer I leave behind. Whoever uses it next is none of my business.
I’ve certainly spotted items in dates’ bathrooms that prompted me to initiate conversations. How long might the “define the relationship” talk have been deferred if I hadn’t seen a makeup-removing cleansing oil in his shower, nestled beside a towering bottle of Old Spice Swagger body wash? The sky-blue tube looked like a travel-size bottle of 2-in-1 at first glance. Until I spied the Japanese text, suggesting that not only was this a premium skincare product, it was an Asian skincare product. And we all know who fucks with Asian skincare: Girls. (Boys — well, boys I date — are hard-pressed to wash their face.)
It’s important not to panic in the face of unfamiliar and potentially damning skincare. So I tucked the bottle away in the filing cabinet of my mind, to be revisited when new information presented itself. Still, I couldn’t stop the internal questions: How much mascara had this product melted into the drain? Was she the type to wear cat-eye liner? How far had things progressed between them for her to feel comfortable in his home, makeup-less? Was this a red flag or a silly misunderstanding? There was only one way to find out.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure that was [redacted’s] from months ago. I forgot it was there,” he said easily, referring to someone he’d casually dated. “I can get rid of it if it bothers you.”
In the age of “Top Shelf” tours and “What’s in my bag” features, we have long since bought into the idea that surveying a collection of someone’s personal-care items will tell us something important about them. But these items also inspire our imagination to project whatever fantasy or paranoia supports the narrative we’re already seeking. A little peek into the medicine cabinet says as much about us as it does about our hosts.
Is this kind of snooping necessarily more uncouth than, say, going through someone’s phone, making a burner account to “investigate” someone’s Instagram, or zooming in on a celebrity’s nostrils in a high-def paparazzi shot? I remember reading a cheeky tip in a magazine about filling your medicine cabinet with marbles when hosting a party so that, when a guest inevitably opens it, they’ll be startled by an avalanche. I’m not sure what that’s meant to accomplish other than giving yourself the chore of cleaning up a bunch of marbles. But unlike digital realms that invite 24/7 surveillance, the medicine cabinet remains a fairly limited (and controllable) site of examination. If you don’t want anyone seeing what’s in there, just stash it somewhere else during your party. And if you really don’t want them to know what you’ve got, you’re probably not inviting them over at all.
When I snoop, what I’m really looking for is clues of humanity. (Being a writer makes you predisposed to being nosy.) I’m drinking in your environment like a Where’s Waldo of your personality. I’m Minecrafting new destinations in my mind, committing them to memory for the sake of object permanence. I love discovering someone’s fragrance, giving it a whiff, and experiencing the affirmation of their scent in concentrate. What I find in someone’s bathroom almost always complicates the idea I have of them. I’m looking for evidence of taste, neurosis, or a not-yet-mentioned partner, yes, but sometimes, I’m also looking for where on the shelf I might fit one day.
I genuinely hope that whoever succeeds me in a man’s bathroom enjoys the Sofie Pavitt face wash, the Cyklar shower gel, the Beauty of Joseon sunscreen. (Just make sure it isn’t expired.) To Waters’ rule of thumb, I’d add my own logic: Behind every well-moisturized straight man is a woman who… tried.
You may have conflicting feelings about the leftover makeup wipes or the micellar water that’s there for you to use the morning after. But another way to look at it is: Why let a good product go to waste? Especially when, as with that little blue bottle, it’s from a fancy Japanese skincare brand.
