Anyone that knows me is aware that despite me being a tad self-obsessed, I am not overly vain, at least about myself…
Yes I take the usual precautions and moderate my eating (excessively) and workout (inefficiently and too often) but barring these, I have taken very little care in what I have worn, skincare, hair in general, how I actually look, how I feel about how I look, and how my presentation impacts my interactions.
As a person who frequently describes himself as having “too much time”, a silly and misguided phrase yet accurate in its own right, I took it upon myself to experiment with vanity for the past few months. Here’s what happened.
Neck wars
I burnt myself pretty badly on my neck as a teenager through extreme aversion to sun cream, silly boy, and a strong desire to lay on a beach reading for hours a day. This resulted in a scar that I hardly noticed until earlier this year when I started to consider my actual appearance.
Now, scars are not a bad thing at all and Hunter S Thompson’s line about “life not being a journey to the grave in a well-preserved body” is something I mostly agree with, but as a budding biohacker and someone who can obsess about anything, given the chance, I wanted to see if I could get rid of it.
It turns out, you can. Kind of.
Bangkok, my glorious home, is rammed full of skin care clinics and beauty clinics and… hmm… Perhaps that’s the reason I decided on this project?
Anyway, I researched a few and found one that fit my usual parameters of any place I visit – pretty looking, convenient, and vaguely overpriced.
I went, did a consultation with a doctor, and after the uncomfortable expense of a cool grand for something I was only middlingly interested in, I received a fuck ton of lasers to my scar.
Did it work?
Ish. After around a month, per the doctor’s words, it did become way less visible though checking through old pics showed that it was scarcely visible before. Funny how we can lock in on one part of our anatomy so diligently.
Well, that was round one of the vanity project and I consider it a success-ish. It successfully showed me that lasering scars probably isn’t worth it unless they’re really impacting you… Lesson learned?
Supplements
Alright yes I love supplements. No I don’t think this relates to my later teenage years enjoyment of similar shaped pills but who knows.
I have been taking a mix of supplements for years and honestly I can say… Most have a pretty minimal effect. I’ve fucked around with heroic doses of them to see if there are any changes and most seem to be so minute in their efficacy that the cost probably isn’t worth it.
But there are a few which do work for sure and I wanted to see if maybe I could do some hardcore experimentation to fix certain things in me. (Yes, I know, “self love, nothing needs fixing” blah blah blah but experimenting is fun and everyone should do more of it.)
Now supplements are all very goal dependent and I highly recommend getting blood tests done to see if you have deficiencies first, then doing diet changes rather than supplements to account for it HOWEVER if you want a simple solution to a low level deficiency, then a supplement is a pretty good way to solve it.
So, onto the recent experiments!
- Post blood test, it seems I have high cholesterol and statins are a big risk so Red Yeast Rice was on the cards and appears to have worked pretty well reducing my cholesterol to the point where the doctor now only loosely suggests statins rather than underlining it in red as on the original test…
- I had terrible sleep and 5-HTP totally levelled me out and brought me back to a normal routine (though I cycle it on/off a lot)
- NMN – seems like it may be good eventually when you’re old but probably no point taking it at this age
- COQ10 to counteract the Red Yeast Rice’s side effects (no other notable benefit)
- Then there’s your standards:
- Vitamin C – works great if you’re ill, take a shit ton and it does help
- Fish oil – just eat fish instead
- Collagen powder – tastes gross but probably works
Now these aren’t too crazy but I also wanted to push the boat out a little.
I’ve had a quite muted emotional range for a long time. Sometimes I break out of this but usually I think my emotions are 60% where they should be, that’s a C grade and I have always been an upper B level student (though I did get an A* in English Language) so I wanted to see if I could chemically push this up.
By spamming ChatGPT, I eventually got a list of a few things that may be the root cause.
One suggestion was low dopamine production. Possibly true given my proclivities at formative ages of development.
Anyway, it turns out there’s a supplement called L-Tyrosine that you can take which kinda sorta (mixed evidence) makes your body produce more neurotransmitters including dopamine, but you have to take P5P (another chemical nobody has heard of) with it so that it actually works.
But does it actually work?
I tried this for over 2 months and I would say that it did… drumroll please… Fuck all.
The bottles of pills have 120 in them though so there’s that… But my mood did not improve. Granted, I did have a heavy breakup in that time too but I would prefer to attribute the blame to pills instead please and thank you.
Now given that the L-Tyrosine and P5P combo didn’t fix my mood I was left wondering what would so I started to consider that maybe it’s hormone related. Too little testosterone perhaps?
A little more research and then I began Korean Panax Ginseng which was meant to support my testosterone or balance it out or some other loose marketing term. Now, at the time it was hard to tell exactly if this one worked but I will say my chest gains in the gym were substantial in a short period of time though I was hammering chest exercises + eating way more protein so it’s a little hard to judge if it worked exactly but I think it sort of did?
My overall thought on supplements is that they make you feel like you’re getting something out them when in reality you’re probably just being more generally health conscious. If you’re a person who researches this stuff heavily, you probably also eat a very balanced diet with good macros especially high protein, you likely sleep well, and probably have very few areas of deficiency where random supplements will make you feel better.
They are worth a punt but get the blood tests first and target specifically.
Testosterone
Now we’re getting somewhere a little juicer and probably more contentious. This one is still part of the project but the vanity part comes later.
I, at 26, had never really considered that my testosterone was low until the supplement experimentation and the positive effects of the ginseng. I always assumed that given certain reasons which are unmentionable that mine was actually very high. After a little encouragement from a friend who takes testosterone, I elected to get it tested, just to double check.
It appeared my results were low. Like clinically low. What the fuck.
I already mentioned my muted emotional range above and what do you know? Testosterone has a big fucking effect on this and mine was clinically low. Whoops.
Who’d’ve thunk it.
So with results in hand, I then went to an endocrinologist (a speciality hormone doctor, it turns out) and repeated the words “what the fuck?”. More tests ensued and it appeared that I had a low FSH and LH production causing low test. Results were confirmed so I said “now what?” and treatment ensued.
To anyone parental or concerned reading this, yes it’s safe, yes I listened to the doctors, and yes I did multiple tests to confirm.
Not pleasant getting 4ml of testosterone shot into your arse but hey this is all an experiment and as Bill Hicks says “None of this is real anyway, it’s just a ride“.
So, 4ml of testosterone is a lot. Or quite a lot when you have someone with low amounts already. I’m around 2 weeks into it and I will say, slightly smirkingly, I am feeling pretty fucking great. More confident, a little stronger, bolder, idk man maybe it’s a placebo or this stuff may have actually been the Holy grail I’ve been seeking. Fun!
Perhaps I’ll report back at some point when some emotional event derails this feeling and I try to find some new cure-all but for now, this experiment has WORKED and I feel GOOD.
Fashion
I’ve never particularly had fashion sense or cared about fashion. From my late teens to early 20s, I bought more or less all my clothes from an online store which sells branded clothes at discounted rates. The clothes however are usually from brands you don’t particularly love or in colours that you won’t particularly like, that’s why they’re cheap I guess.
They did usually have some Adidas stuff though so my wardrobe became laden with 3 stripes on every item. I thought it looked cool. It sometimes did. But often, especially during my shaved head phase, it did look a little uhhhh rough? To say the least.
This enjoyment of streetwear persisted for quite a while and I still have periods of constantly wearing it for a few months every year but around April last year I wanted to switch this up. This one has been a LONG and ongoing experiment, it’s a lifetime thing I guess.
So, from around April to October ish, I decided I wanted to be more formal and adult looking. Looking like a real person. Not a droid but like a well put together man. Fuck knows why. I think I decided I was old or getting old and needed to. Stupid thoughts like that about being old persist in your mid 20s and they must be ignored.
This phase had me in cotton shirts, consistently formal trousers, thinning the mass of rings I was previously wearing, and wearing a watch all the time. It was nice to play that role for a while and visit restaurants acting like I’m all that. It felt a bit inauthentic though and I decided a long time ago that I ought to be more authentic so…
After October(ish) I reverted back to a sportswear dominated style and started buying up a lot of branded items but without much thought about how they looked. I judged these on how I felt and generally I felt more confident in them than in the heavily formal attire, it felt closer to home and anyone who’s from the same part of the world as me will probably know what I mean. Grey Nike jumpers litter my childhood memories.
One downside of only wearing sportswear is that you do limit the options of where you can go. Even in particularly lax Bangkok environments, you will struggle to feel in any way comfortable against the army of dripped out Thais.
Noticing this, I decided more recently to ditch the trackies and risk wearing jeans in the consistently 33 degree heat.
Now, that may seem bizarre but climate acclimatisation is so real and the jeans are fine. I couldn’t quite let go of all the sportswear though and have to pair the jeans with a Nike or Adidas or New Balance T shirt, gotta be true to yourself.
This one was a fun experiment and actually is still ongoing 🙂 It’s nice to totally change how you see yourself and how others see you by altering what you wear. I’m still the same me in a suit or in shorts but I do feeeeeel different in each and I do act different in each so it’s nice to play with, especially when you have the time.
The Cerave Cult
One thing that I never particularly put any stock in was skin care. I’m quite pretty right and assumed that because of this I was fine to not do anything. A little arrogant but a lot misguided.
Again, more ChatGPT spamming and a visit to a skin care clinic and I realised that skin care is way easier if you start from a good place with healthy skin, rather than trying to repair things later down the line – which is only questionably possible, unless you do surgeries.
Now rather than opting for surgeries, although perhaps I am the type who would, I was looking for sustainable long term care. The type of shit that most girls seem to know exactly how to do and that most guys have zero idea that they even need to.
Enter Cerave. I doubt I’d even really heard of the brand until this year but it seemed they were the one. Very high quality and no awful chemicals, apparently.
Anyway with a pocket full of Thai Baht I went to one of the luxury malls here and stood out quite significantly amongst the heavily made up Thai girls (I was in essentially a full tracksuit – my sportswear phase), and showed one of the people in the store a list of items I supposedly MUST use.
I walked away with a lot less Baht and a lot of things I had no idea existed let alone things I needed to use.
For starters, there was this DHC oil – some kind of Korean beauty brand that helps remove oil from your skin which is especially useful in this climate, a hydrating Cerave cleanser (at least I kind of knew what that was), Cerave facial moisturising lotion, Cerave resurfacing 1% retinol cream (more expensive per ml than good tequila), some 0.5% salicylic acid, then luxury sun cream which apparently is better but it’s bloody hard to tell the difference – La Roche-Posay Anthelios 50+ – about £30 for an unreasonably small amount.
I had often wondered why a lot of women talk about it being expensive to be a woman and this experiment showed me why – This beauty stuff is expensive. If you use these things and more every day, you start to rack up a pretty significant monthly bill.
Is it worth it? Actually yes… I think. I’ve been using these products in a quite regimented way with a daily routine and the variation days where I’ll fold in retinol one day and use salicylic acid another day.
Initially it was a hassle convincing my brain to do this as a routine but now it’s basically automatic and so slick that I don’t even notice I’m doing it. And my skin, mostly, looks fucking great. Good job, Max. Thanks.
Gym Missions
Alright I’ve been going to the gym a long time but my progress has always been pretty lacklustre. Full accountability, this is entirely on me.
I’ve never really stuck to an effective routine, never particularly researched what I was doing or why, and never tracked or set goals other than loosely get a six pack or something.
Well, we’re in experimental mode so I thought I’d change that. I put a proper routine together, again AI aided (Side note: not using this stuff is gonna put you behind, luddites never prosper), and set to work.
Now it seemed my main issue actually was that I never ate enough protein or calories at all. I was pretty muscular despite my small frame but had no mass because I never ate enough.
Somewhere along the line I became very calorie averse and lived on literally the minimum needed. Bad move in general and a very bad move for gym gains.
But now is as good a time as any to change, I thought, so I pushed my eating like crazy and gained about 10kg. Pretty good. And my lifts improved, strength went up massively, and I felt even more confident.
It’s funny how fixing some of these things; style, strength, appearance can really help your internal feelings.
I’ve since played around with different body weights with a 5-10 KG difference and realised getting a six pack is more about being in a pretty brutal calorie deficit + ab training, rather than just exclusively training abs.
It looks cool but after having one for a little while, I’ve realised I prefer not being perpetually hungry.
My current focus is on arms. My legs are weirdly quite jacked after hammering the leg curl machine for a while, and my back is too – probably from climbing and nonstop pull ups, so it’s time to balance the rest of me out. No interest in going bodybuilder mode but getting a more solid structure would do wonders for me.
This is another ongoing project, and it’s one that is continually making me look and feel better. I love it. Clean living!
Conclusion
I realise that a lot of this is a rant into the void and may have been better as a journal entry but fuck it, why have a blog unless you’re gonna post self-obsessed characterisations of yourself?
To whomever is reading this far, I encourage you to experiment like crazy.
You are likely young, play with it. Try different styles, different bodyweights, routines you wouldn’t normally do, and research this stuff – maybe you’ll find out something you never knew about yourself and get injected with hormones by random doctors in Asia (only joking👀).
Alright people, catch you on the flip.
Quotes I’m vibing with rn:
If it costs you your peace: it’s too expensive – Paulo Coelho
What if it all works out? – Mel Robbins
To do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen – Tim Ferriss
Favourite song for now:
Sumb Luck 