This is Dapper & Groomed. And This Is Me.

My view from the sofa yesterday afternoon. This isn't a studio; it's just the corner where, between the school runs and the chaos, I try to write something honest.

Yesterday, late afternoon, I found myself sitting on the sofa doing something I rarely do: nothing. Just looking at the room.

Our living room is not a showroom. It is not the kind of space you see in YouTube thumbnails — clean desk, ring light, perfectly placed product on a white surface. Ours has a 65” TV that the kids have long since claimed. A turntable. Speakers. Alexa on the shelf. The robot vacuum base in the corner, which Marlow — our dog — still regards with deep personal suspicion. Picture frames on every wall. A desk that is also the dining table and the homework station and the place where I try, every morning, to write something worth reading.

It is a family house. A busy one. And sitting there yesterday, I thought: this is where every single piece of content I have ever created came from. This room. This life. These people.

I have been running Dapper & Groomed since 2013. Thirteen years. Hundreds of products tested. Skincare. Fragrance. Fashion. Tech. Audio. Sexual wellness. A Vuelio Top 20 listing (best blog). Brands I grew up admiring, eventually contacting me. And yet I am not sure I have ever properly explained who I am or why any of this exists.

So here it is.

6:45am, Bristol

My mornings start early and they start at full speed. Up at quarter to seven, shower, skincare routine — yes, a proper one, not a splash of water — breakfast, emails, check the stats on the site, scan the news. By 7:30 I'm waking the house. Four kids: my daughter who's 17, the twins, a boy and a girl, who are 15, and the little one, 10, who is currently the loudest person in any room she enters.

Breakfast for everyone. Pack lunches. Feed Marlow. Walk Marlow. And by 8:20 we leave in a small convoy — secondary school, primary school, college — before I come back, often via a quick food shop, and sit down to write.

By 3pm, I'm back on pick-up duty.

This is not a glamorous content creator life. There is no team, no editor, no studio. There is a desk in the corner of a living room, a man who genuinely loves what he reviews, and about four hours of focused work between the school run and the school pick-up. Everything you read on this site was written inside that window, tested in this house, often with a dog asleep at my feet and twins arguing about something upstairs.

How I ended up here

I'm half French, half Italian, which means I was born arguing about food and have strong opinions about fragrance. I grew up in Toulouse-France. At 18 I was already on the radio as a DJ — not the cool kind, the local station kind, but it was my first real experience of understanding sound, of knowing what sounds good and why.

In 1993 I moved to Palma de Mallorca for what was meant to be six months working in the hotel and entertainment industry. I stayed seventeen years. Seventeen. Audio became my obsession during those years — speakers, mixing desks, sound systems, the whole world of how music reaches a room and what happens to it on the way. That background is why, when I review a pair of headphones or earbuds today, I'm not reading a spec sheet and rewriting it. I know what I'm listening for. I spent two decades learning it.

When I eventually moved to the UK — Bristol, where we still live, where the kids have grown up — I transitioned into pharmacy work as a healthcare assistant. Which sounds like a left turn, but it wasn't. It meant I spent years behind a pharmacy counter, understanding ingredients, talking to patients about what actually works and what is marketing, watching couples come in for advice they couldn't get anywhere else.

What I miss

There is one thing about the UK that I have never fully adapted to, and I think about it more than I probably should.

I don't drink. Which means I am not, in any meaningful sense, a pub person. And in England, if you're not a pub person, you can feel the absence of something without quite being able to name it. What I miss — what I genuinely ache for sometimes — is the French café at midnight. The Spanish bar at 1am. The one where you sit with someone, or alone, with a coffee or a Perrier, and you talk about everything and nothing until it is too late to be sensible about it. That culture of just being in public, among people, not performing, just existing in a shared space.

Bristol is a wonderful city. Our life here is full. But that specific thing — I haven't found it. And I think it feeds something in me that comes out in the writing. A desire for depth, for conversation, for more than the surface of things.

Why sexual wellness is on a grooming website

Because men have sex. And men have questions they don't ask. And men are not well served by either the sniggering approach or the clinical one.

Working in pharmacy, I sat across from more men than I can count who had questions about intimacy, about their bodies, about their relationships, that they were embarrassed to ask and that nobody was writing about honestly. I am French. We approach these things differently. Sex is not a taboo category in my world — it is part of life, part of a relationship, part of being a whole person. So yes, sexual wellness lives on this site. Reviewed the same way I review everything else: properly, personally, without embarrassment.

What Dapper & Groomed actually is

It is not a niche grooming blog. It is not a tech review channel. It is not a fashion site.

It is one man's attempt to document a full life honestly. The skincare routine that actually works for skin that has been through some things. The fragrance that stopped me in my tracks at a perfumery in Bristol/Birmingham/London. The headphones I've been wearing since six this morning. The robot vacuum that has, against all odds, become a genuine part of how this house functions. The things I want to tell my readers the same way I'd tell a friend — with enthusiasm, with honesty, and with the specificity that only comes from actually using something.

Most content on the internet is written by people who haven't used what they're describing, or who've used it for 48 hours, or who are describing what the press release told them to say. I've been doing this since 2013. I have tested hundreds of products. I bring a pharmacy background to skincare, two decades in professional audio to tech, a French and Italian sensibility to fragrance and style, and a busy family life to everything else.

When Insta360 first contacted me — a brand I had genuinely admired from a distance, one of those emails you read twice because you're sure it can't be for you — I remember sitting at this desk and feeling something that wasn't quite pride. More like disbelief. Me. The guy in Bristol. They wanted to work with me.

That feeling hasn't gone away. When Horace reached out — a French brand I'd followed for years — I read their email three times in a row. I still do this. I am still, in the best possible way, a little bit shocked when a brand I respect shows up in my inbox.

I don't think that's naivety. I think it's the right relationship to have with this work. The moment it feels routine is the moment it stops being any good.

A note on the internet right now

Something has changed out there, and if you spend any time reading about products online, you've probably felt it without being able to name it.

The web is now full of sites that exist for one reason only: to make money from your click. They are built by algorithms, written by AI, and they have never touched, worn, tested or smelled a single thing they describe. They look like reviews. They have the structure of reviews. But there is nobody home. No human behind it. No kitchen table where the product got opened. No dog sniffing the packaging. No teenager wandering in to ask what that is.

Search engines like Google are aware of this. They are trying to find these sites and push them down. The problem — and it is a real one — is that sometimes in their sweep they catch personal sites like mine in the net too. A site built on genuine reviews, real affiliate links, real testing, can look from the outside a little like one of those hollow operations. So rankings move. Traffic shifts. It feels, honestly, a bit like a rollercoaster.

But here is what I can tell you about Dapper & Groomed.

Every product on this site has been in this house. Opened at this kitchen table, often with one of the kids leaning over my shoulder asking what it is. If something doesn't work, I say so. If something is genuinely bad, I'd rather not write about it at all than pretend otherwise. And when something is excellent — really, properly excellent — I am embarrassingly enthusiastic about it. Ask anyone who's read my Insta360 reviews.

This is not a content operation. It is a person, sharing what he finds, honestly, from a slightly chaotic family home in Bristol. That is all it has ever been. And that is exactly what it will keep being.

What comes next

Thirteen years. I still can't quite believe it when I sit down and think about it.

I am proud of what DapperandGroomed.com has become. Genuinely, deeply proud — not in a self-congratulatory way, but in the way you feel proud of something you built with your own hands, in the gaps between the school run and the pick-up, at a desk in the corner of a busy family living room. Every review, every guide, every honest verdict on something that did or didn't work. Thirteen years of that.

And I am not done. Not even close.

There are products sitting on this desk right now that I cannot wait to tell you about. Experiences I want to share. Corners of this life — Bristol, the south west coast, the fragrance discoveries, the tech that genuinely makes a difference — that I think deserve more space on these pages. I have things to give to this place still, and I intend to give them.

But Dapper & Groomed has always been a conversation, not a broadcast. So before I go, I want to ask you something.

What would you like to see more of?

Places to visit in the south west of England? More life posts — the real, unpolished kind? Deeper fragrance writing? More tech? Something I haven't thought of yet?

Tell me. Leave a comment, send me an email, find me on Instagram at lifestylejerome or on YouTube at lifestylewithjerome. I read everything. I answer everything. That part has never changed and it never will.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading, for the emails over the years, for the comments that reminded me — on the days when this felt difficult — that what I do actually means something to someone.

And as it's that time of year: Happy Easter to every single one of you. I hope it's spent somewhere good, with people you love, eating something that makes you close your eyes.

See you in the next one.

— Jerome