From Grooming to Personal Style: How to Actually Feel More Confident

Confidence is a weird one. Some people seem to have loads of it and you can’t figure out why. Others look like they should be brimming with it but clearly aren’t. The truth is most of it comes down to small, boring stuff — whether you bothered getting a decent haircut this month, whether your clothes actually fit, whether you slept properly last night. Not glamorous. But it works.

The UK men’s grooming market crossed £10 billion in 2023. Growing at nearly 10% a year, skincare alone accounts for about 35% of that. Blokes aren’t suddenly obsessed with their appearance — they’ve just cottoned on to the fact that basic maintenance makes you feel better. Same principle as keeping your flat tidy or your car serviced. Things work better when you look after them. You included.

Grooming doesn’t need to be complicated

Most men already know what they should be doing. Wash your face, moisturise, get regular haircuts, brush your teeth. The issue is consistency. You buy a cleanser, use it for a fortnight, then it sits on the shelf collecting dust until you chuck it out six months later. Sound familiar?

What actually makes a difference isn’t expensive products or a ten-step routine. It’s doing the simple stuff every day without thinking about it too hard.

• Face: CeraVe Hydrating Cleanser (about £12) is one of the few products NHS dermatologists consistently recommend. Pair it with The Ordinary Niacinamide at £6 for oiliness and texture. Around 65% of men who stick with a basic routine say they feel noticeably better about their skin. Not transformed — just better. That’s enough.
• Hair: A textured crop or a fade from a decent barber costs £25 to £40 and does more for your appearance than any product you could buy. If you’ve been cutting your own fringe during lockdown habits that never died, stop. Go to an actual barber. Tell them what you want or ask what they reckon suits your face shape. They do this all day long.
• Teeth: Brush and floss. Colgate Max White costs about £4. Studies suggest a brighter smile bumps up how confident other people perceive you by roughly 20%. Cheap win.
• Nails: Just keep them trimmed and clean. Takes thirty seconds. Nobody’s expecting a manicure, but ragged nails in a meeting or on a date leave an impression you don’t want.

Ten minutes a day covers all of this. The bar isn’t high — it’s just about clearing it consistently.

Hair loss is worth talking about

Roughly 40% of men notice thinning by 35. It’s one of those things that gnaws at you quietly — you see it in photos, you catch it in a changing room mirror, you start angling your head differently without realising you’re doing it. Most men don’t talk about it because there’s still this daft stigma around caring, but it affects confidence more than people let on.

Options have come a long way though. A Hair transplant UK Harley Street procedure using FUE — follicular unit extraction, where individual grafts get moved from the back and sides to wherever the thinning is — has become the standard approach. Smaller cases dealing with early temple recession start around £3,000 for roughly 500 grafts. Bigger sessions running 4,000+ grafts push up to £10,000–£12,000. Price per graft is usually about £3 at reputable clinics, and survival rates sit around 95%.

It’s a proper investment and not something to rush. Results take 9 to 12 months to fully come through. But for men who’ve spent years quietly adjusting their hair in every reflective surface they pass, it can shift something that no amount of thickening shampoo or strategic styling ever managed.

What to actually wear

Personal style gets overcomplicated by people who want to sell you things. The reality for most men is much simpler: own a handful of pieces that fit properly, suit your colouring, and don’t make you feel like you’re wearing a costume.

You can sort out the bones of a solid wardrobe for about £250.

A Barbour waxed jacket (£189–£289 depending on the model) is one of those rare things that works with jeans, chinos, and smarter trousers without looking out of place in any of those combinations. It also ages well, which most jackets don’t. Clarks Desert Boots at around £120 split the difference between trainers and something more polished — useful if you want one pair of shoes that covers most situations. Slim-cut chinos from M&S (£35) or Hackett (£95 if you want to spend more) look sharper than jeans in most settings and feel just as comfortable once you’ve found the right fit.

On colour — if you’ve never really thought about it, navy and forest green flatter roughly 80% of British skin tones. Safe starting points. You can branch out from there once you know what works.

Here’s something that sounds a bit academic but actually holds up: research into “enclothed cognition” found that wearing clothes you mentally associate with competence improves your focus by about 25%. Separately, about 65% of people perceive someone in well-fitted clothing as more capable and authoritative. You don’t need to spend a fortune to trigger that — even getting a £15 alteration on a high-street jacket so the shoulders sit properly changes how the whole thing looks and how you feel wearing it.

The stuff that actually fuels confidence

You can get the grooming right and dress well and still feel rubbish if you’re running on four hours of sleep and your diet is mostly Greggs and energy drinks. The physical side underpins everything else.

The NHS recommends 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week. Sounds like a lot until you break it down — half an hour of brisk walking, five days out of seven. No gym. No equipment. No lycra. Just moving at a pace where you’re slightly out of breath. The mood lift from regular walking is one of the most consistently proven effects in exercise research, and most people feel the difference within a couple of weeks.

Sleep is the other big one. The British Sleep Society says 7 to 9 hours. Your body does most of its skin cell regeneration and hair follicle recovery during deep sleep, which is why chronic short sleepers tend to look rough even when they’re otherwise healthy. Getting consistent sleep sorted is probably the single highest-impact health change most people could make, and yet it’s the one everybody ignores in favour of buying another serum.

Diet doesn’t need to be a project. Follow the NHS Eatwell Guide loosely — more actual food, fewer things that come in packaging with ingredient lists you can’t pronounce, enough water, vegetables treated as a normal part of meals rather than an occasional garnish. The difference it makes to your energy, your skin, and your general mood is significant enough that you’ll notice it within a month.

It compounds

A £25 haircut won’t fix everything. A new jacket won’t either. But a decent haircut plus clean skin plus clothes that fit plus regular sleep plus moving your body a few times a week — that combination builds a baseline where you just feel alright about yourself most days. And “feeling alright about yourself most days” is honestly what confidence is for the vast majority of people. It’s not some dramatic transformation. It’s the absence of that low-level discomfort that comes from knowing you’re not really looking after yourself.

Start wherever’s easiest. A good barber and a basic cleanser costs under £50 total and takes an hour out of your week. Go from there.