I bought 2 Dudes because TikTok told me to. Then Woolies started stocking it.

I'm going to start with the part I keep returning to: 2 Dudes is now in Woolworths. Not just the bigger metro stores. The local one near my place. It is sitting on the shelf next to Bulldog and Nivea Men, and it is positioned as the premium-pharmacy option in a supermarket category that has historically required something to actually work to earn that placement. It does not work. That's the entire problem with this confession, and it's the part that took me three weeks to write through.

Let me back up. I bought the 2 Dudes Daily Routine in January, after the algorithm spent six straight weeks showing me the founder talking about how blokes are intimidated by skincare and how this brand was here to change that. The branding is, full credit, excellent. Photographically engineered green aluminium, copy that doesn't talk down, a founder who comes across as genuinely likeable. I bought it. Of course I bought it.

The cleanser strips. The moisturiser thins. The "serum" is glycerin.

Across the six-week test we ran for Glow's Best Men's Skincare ranking, 2 Dudes underperformed every single product we tested. The Daily Cleanser foams aggressively and is too high-pH for daily use on combination or dry skin — both of our testers in those skin types reported tightness within the first week. The moisturiser leans on synthetic fragrance to mask a thin emollient base; one tester described it as "smells like a footy locker room", which I cannot improve upon. The "serum" — niacinamide and glycerin in a thin suspension — is a token gesture rather than a properly-dosed actives product.

Two of our three testers reported transient redness or dryness in week one. Nobody reported any visible benefit by week six. The score, in Glow's full ranking, came in at 5.2/10 — the lowest in the men's category by a meaningful margin, and a full 4.2 points below the top-ranked Australian alternative (Frasé Skin at 9.4).

Why Woolworths is the part I can't stop thinking about.

Skincare in supermarkets is a credibility short-circuit. The buyer assumption — fairly — is that a major retailer's beauty buyer has done some level of due diligence before allocating valuable shelf space. When Bulldog earned its Coles distribution, the formulation deserved it. The product genuinely works for the audience it serves. It is, at $14.95, an honest moisturiser sold honestly to people who didn't grow up using skincare.

2 Dudes in Woolworths is a different story. The placement is the sales pitch. A man walks past the skincare aisle, sees a brand he half-recognises from TikTok, sees that Woolworths has decided it belongs there, infers that it must be at least as good as the brands around it, picks it up. The implicit endorsement is doing the heavy lifting that the formulation is not. The end-state is that more men will use 2 Dudes for longer before realising it isn't doing anything for them — at which point a lot of them will conclude that skincare doesn't work for men, rather than that this skincare doesn't work for men. That's the part that frustrates me.

The branding-to-formulation gap is the real story.

The skin-care industry has a particular failure mode where the brand spend visibly dwarfs the formulation spend. You can read it on the bottle. The container is engineered. The colour palette is calibrated. The founder has a media-trained backstory. And then you flip to the supplement panel — sorry, the ingredient list — and the actives are present in tracer-dose amounts that wouldn't move the needle in a clinical trial running ten times the daily exposure.

That's 2 Dudes. The exterior is the product. The interior is an afterthought. In a category where the formulation gap between $14.95 (Bulldog) and $35–45 per Frasé Skin product is wide enough to drive a truck through, 2 Dudes parked itself in the middle of the road, charged closer to Frasé prices, delivered closer to Bulldog formulation, and added synthetic fragrance.

What to buy instead — at every price point.

The Australian men's skincare shelf in 2026 has actually-good options at every price point. None of them are 2 Dudes.

The lesson, again.

The pattern repeats and I keep falling for it. A founder, a TikTok presence, an Instagram-engineered bottle, a story that makes the buyer feel like a particular kind of person for buying it. The first time it was Ink Nurse and a tattoo. This time it's 2 Dudes and a moisturiser. Both products are competently mediocre. Both bottles are exceptional. Both founders are likeable. Both brands have spent more on art direction than on chemistry. Both got my $79–$89.

The supermarket placement is the new wrinkle. When a brand earns shelf space through marketing rather than formulation, the shelf placement starts doing the marketing's work. The buyer no longer has to be persuaded. They just have to be in the aisle. Which, this week, was me — standing in front of a stack of 2 Dudes Daily Moisturiser at my local Woolworths, thinking: oh no, more people are going to make my mistake.

Read Glow's full Best Men's Skincare ranking for the brands actually worth your bathroom shelf. Frasé Skin at the top, then Aesop, then Triumph & Disaster. 2 Dudes is in the ranking too — at the bottom, where it belongs.