Hasta La Creative!

Stroll down any health and beauty aisle of any supermarket or drug store, and there is no confusion about where the gender lines are drawn. In the case of deodorant, one section contains uber-masculine Old Spice and a separate section contains ultra-femme Secret. Look left in the shaving aisle and you’ll feel the manly power of Gillette’s Fusion and Mach 3 brands. Look right and your choices include the flowery pastels of Skintimate shaving cream and the goddess-worthy Gillette Venus product line. Never shall the two extreme sections comingle. Until now.

President Obama’s issuance of school guidelines for transgender students and public restrooms, as well as the State of North Carolina and the U.S. Justice Department expressing their disagreements in the form of lawsuits against one another, has clearly elevated the conversation around gender roles and gender fluidity to a national level. Even the Marines have recently revised 19 of their official titles to remove the word “man” in order to be more inclusive. In fact, debates are still brewing today in several states throughout the country. While these issues are nowhere near settled, one thing is clear — personal care brands certainly need to play catch-up.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the bathroom. Of course, not the public facilities of the original debate, but rather our home bathrooms. They’re somewhat of a sanctuary — a place where we surround ourselves with the products that are most intimate to our lives and identities. But even as health and beauty brands have made valiant attempts to evolve with the ever-changing tastes of consumers, they’ve fallen horribly behind by clinging to hard gender boundaries, almost dictating what products we should use.

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