Why men don't wear cosmetics

Once upon a time, when wealth and power looked like the landed nobility of Europe, men's fashions included every bit as much powder, rouge, jewelry, lace, silk, brocade, and wiggery as ladies' fashions did. Because, naturally, it wasn't enough to be wealthy and powerful -- one also needed to be seen as wealthy and powerful, which meant that ostentatious display was part of the deal.

But a couple of things happened to change that. One such thing was the French Revolution, which transformed the sheltered privilege of France's landed nobility from a near-insurmountable advantage into a death sentence, and hammered home the point for all of Europe's nobles that the common folk really did outnumber them by an enormous margin, and that those unwashed masses really weren't controllable unless they allowed themselves to be controlled. Wealth was redistributed by force, and power shifted from the (mostly) lords who'd held it for centuries, to the commoners that they'd been lording it over.

The other thing that happened, of course, was the other revolution: the Industrial Revolution. The effects of this are far-reaching and ongoing, but the immediate effect was to move most of the population of the Industrialized world away from the crop-growing lands that had formed the basis of the wealth of the landed nobility (hint: it's the "landed" part), and towards the cities where factories could be built. Factories, and mass production generally, relies on population density and economies of scale to work, and requires a lot of money to build things like factories and work-houses in the first place, which meant that landed nobles saw their holding of land rapidly lose value, while the bankers, financiers, and common industrialists that they'd been sneering at suddenly became society's power brokers.

And, as both wealth and power shifted from the ostentatious display of landed nobility towards the bankers and industrialists who'd never much cared about that sort of vanity, the image of what wealth and power looked like also shifted. Powdered wigs persisted in courts of law, at least in some parts of the world, but the new uniform of the wealthy and powerful became the simple, sober suit.

And it was a uniform: bankers and financiers eventually settled into charcoal and navy, while men outside the power structure often opted for earth tones; clergy and undertakers wore black. But the basic construction of the suit was common across all professions and social strata, and it's proved to be such a durable design that it's still the uniform, even in our age of business-casual tech-sector workplaces. It's still dark, and plain, and largely devoid of ostentation and ornamentation, and if you want to look like to you belong in the corridors of real wealth and power, you'd better be willing to put one on, and able to look good wearing it.