Blog entry for Media and Visual Literacy class
I came across this Conair brand grooming kit and was a bit stricken by the product design.
Conair is a long-standing manufacturer of grooming supplies including combs, hairdryers, electric razors, and groomers like this one. While I would not normally consider a hair trimmer to be a gendered item, the marketing team at Conair seems to think otherwise. They have taking this basic grooming tool and given it a visual look inspired by (manly!) hand tools. In this case taking the black and yellow motif that is the signature look of DeWalt tools.
The semiotics of this marketing decision are clear: this is no sissy’s groomer. This is a TOOL for GETTING IT DONE. In the broader context of basic grooming equipment, no other company that I could find was applying this type of visual design. Even Conair’s own higher end offerings, marketed towards professionals, had a much more staid design, like this one: https://www.conair.com/c/24b35/chrome-3in1-kit/788.
Obviously women can use professional looking hand tools too, but I think the target audience for this item is men who need every tool they own to evince the kind of tough manliness that comes from knowing how to use TOOLS.
Dan Gitlin 
I have not seen this item in the stores myself, but I agree that it is designed to resemble DeWalt tools. I have seen many personal groomers that are geared towards men or women before. Part of the reasoning I believe is that women and men have different kinds of hair. Men have thicker, courser hair then women tend to have. Beards for example are very stiff and scratchy. A typical woman’s razor wouldn’t be able to handle that. I also think that a man’s shaver would be bigger than a woman’s because men have more hair to shave. If you compare how a woman’s leg hair grows with a beard and mustache, it’s obvious that women’s hair is finer and softer and doesn’t grow in as thick and full as a man’s hair.
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