Of all the intimate experiences a guy can get for 15 bucks, a beard trim is my favorite. Sure, I could just buy a clipper and clean things up myself, except a) I'm lazy, and b) the experience at Freemans Sporting Club is impossible to replicate. The hipster barbershop's throwback environment centers around men talking about manly things—think Mel Brooks movies, Stan Bush's "The Touch," "the woman in the pink dress." Of course, it's easier to hear all that when you have a towel over your eyes, which is the first thing that happens after your barber leans you back in the chair, dentist-style. (Said towel did, sadly, cause me to miss the pink-dress beauty.)

Last time I went, my barber was Van, an agreeable fishing enthusiast from Westchester. He started me off with a second towel—this one warm, wet, and smelling of shaving cream, which got my beard a-tingling. After a minute or so to soak it up, he removed it and started with the clippers. I know I'm conforming to the Freemans urban-hillbilly stereotype here, but I prefer to keep things on the gruff side, so I had him leave some growth on my face before using an electric trimmer for a bit of texture. After all that, he shaved the edges on my neck and cheeks, and I completed the transformation from mountain man to refined mountain man—a crucial distinction. Especially when hoping to impress women in pink dresses.
Freemans Sporting Club, 8 Rivington St., New York, NY, (212) 673-3209, freemanssportingclub.com

Cleaning your teeth is nothing if not tedious, which helps explain why brands like Crest and Colgate increasingly taste like Halloween treats. But if you ask me, oral hygiene should be dull and punishing, the way God and your dentist intended: You should finish feeling virtuous and above all, clean, not like you've gotten away with something. Which is why I use Weleda's drab, homely—and absolutely fantastic—salt toothpaste.

Thick, silty, the color of fresh mud (to put it kindly), the stuff ain't pretty (though I do like the modish, glitter-free packaging). Don't go reading the ingredients, either—the European doctors who concocted the stuff may have been enraptured by "horse chestnut," but I'd rather not think about rubbing it on my teeth. Drawing on the stain-removing power of baking soda—long before American toothpastes caught on to the Arm & Hammer phenomenon—Weleda's paste leaves your mouth almost shockingly clean. Just one word of warning (well, aside from the stuff about it being thick and silty): Weleda's is fluoride free, so you shouldn't use it every day. What you brush with on your off days is up to you, of course, though for safety reasons I recommend steering clear of Crest Extreme Mint Explosion.
Weleda Salt toothpaste, $5 for 3.3 oz tube, available at select Whole Body by Whole Foods Market stores and at shop.weleda.com