The Best Gifts for Men, Manly Men, and Menly Man Men

You know what men like? Knowing how long something is, or how far away it is. Know what they (I) don't like? Stretching out a dinky tape measure that keeps shimmying or bending or snapping back into the roll. The solution to everything is always lasers. Lasers can do anything. Just ask Elon Musk.

Anyway, just point this Mileseey S50 at anything, press the button, set your starting measuring point, and it'll tell you how far away it is. (It measures to the 1/32 of an inch, but I wouldn't trust it past 1/16 of an inch.) Get a tripod for it, and you can also do point-to-point measurements from a distance. I've measured windows for fittings. Door jambs. Most of the rooms and spaces in my house. I've barely used tape for four months. Why use tape when you can use lasers? Mileseey says the green laser light on this S50 is more visible than red light during the daytime. Maybe this is true. There are also a whole lot of trigonometric functions I haven't figured out, and the included instructions are only half helpful. But mostly I just want to know: How big is that thing? How far away?

Nothing is manlier than overkill. Lots of grill gloves can take a little heat, and save you from a hospital visit on a grill day. But can they take you to the gates of hell? These Hell Hands grill gloves from Big Green Egg are rated up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. They're made with thick cowhide that goes most of the way up to your elbows—and look like something you'd wear for the zombie apocalypse. The pads are made with thick, puncture-resistant Armortex fabric and stitched with Kevlar.

I don't know if this makes these gloves bulletproof. But what I do know is that I have placed my palm flat onto a scalding 500-degree cast-iron pan while wearing one of these Hell Hands. I barely felt warmth, let alone heat. These gloves are monsters. But note that these gloves are thick enough that your hands will feel more like mittens than hands. You'll need to use manly finger strength to flex them.

These pants are the most tactical pants of all pants, according to WIRED reviewer Scott Gilbertson. Cargo pants look like a baggy bouquet of pockets. But these pants? They are for men of action. They are stretch canvas, svelte, sturdy. They have pockets inside other pockets, pockets that remove traces of being pockets. If you're the sort of guy who wants to look good, without looking like you want to look good, these pants are your pants.

You might wonder whether black is the most natural color for a cooler, given its propensity for absorbing heat. OK, and? Suck it up, and embrace the steely, Vader-esque manliness of this Ultra-Tough cooler from RTIC. It's roto-molded, natch, but it's also filled with 2.8 inches of foam. I have tested the 45-quart version while tailgating in temps where the cooler was actually helping keep our seltzers from exploding.

The Ultra-Tough is a beast to carry by yourself (the manly way, the way John Wayne would carry a cooler) because it weighs almost 30 pounds empty. This means it's about 55 pounds with a 24-pack of Bud Light, and 60 pounds if you toss in a 5-pound bag of ice from the store. But the foam handles mounted on free-swinging ropes make it manageable. In terms of build quality, this RTIC cooler is actually a little more solid than the Yeti size 65 that I previously owned, especially when it comes to the leak-free screw-in drain plug. —Martin Cizmar

Pat LaFrieda is a New York butcher. His dad was a butcher, and his dad's dad was a butcher, and so was the dad before that. The first butcher became a butcher after he got in a fistfight outside a butcher shop. This is Naples, Italy, we're talking about, where you sell meat or you are the meat. (We made this proverb up, but it seems right.) Anyway, this is not just good but actually great beef in a box. Pat LaFrieda beef is the beef served at some of the most famous restaurants in New York. It will also come in the mail, wherever you are: fresh, never frozen. And then it goes on the fire. According to WIRED meat delivery guide boss Scott Gilbertson, smart people wait for that super-fresh beef with a catcher's mitt, then cook it right up. Beef this good, you don't make it wait.

Waxed canvas is a manly fabric. A working man's fabric. It sheds water like a senator sheds consequences. But unlike politicians, this jacket builds character over time. It becomes itself. It'll build your character, too—or at least make you into one. After all, this is the jacket Pedro Pascal wore in The Last of Us, worn and rubbed down until it became shades darker. Because this is what silent, manly men wear, and wardrobe people know this. And sure, this Flint and Tinder trucker's jacket doesn't breathe quite as well as boring, unwaxed cotton. It resists everything except compliments.

An American man gathers bulk over time. It is the burden he carries, like the weight of responsibility or the consequence of bacon. Anyway, this shirt is made for the stout at heart (and maybe middle) but strong of arm. It hugs the biceps and chest, showing off raw power. But unlike a lot of T-shirts, it doesn't blouse out like a 1950s nightshirt. It's a man's shirt. For men who are a lot of man. A reliable white T-shirt, and a black T-shirt, are needed by pretty much all men.

If you put words Amazon doesn’t like in a product’s name, that immediately makes it more manly. To wit, there’s Duke Cannon’s Best Damn Beard Oil, for scratchy facial hair. This beard oil helps prevent ingrown hairs and makes facial hair feel softer to the touch. Though, please note, the bottle says explicitly that it’s “not for clowns,” so don’t buy this for any Pagliaccis in your life. —Eric Ravenscraft

Just look at that name: Moccamaster. This is a coffeemaker that drinks and breathes pure power and precision. The Technivorm Moccamaster is burly, yet precise. It makes old-school drip coffee, better than that fancy Starbucks stuff. But what the manly man in your life should truly love about the Moccamaster is that it’s real hand-tooled craftsmanship. It is perhaps the world’s only high-end coffee maker that looks like a power tool made by DeWalt, and it is just as sturdy.

It’s been handmade since 1968 in the Netherlands, a country where their idea of a party is often just blowing things up. The precision-made Moccamaster will keep your coffee within a four-degree range for optimum brewing. And its parts can be replaced or repaired, just like the engine of an old car. Judging from others’ experience, it’ll probably last you decades. What a machine. Moccamaster.

Does a man wait for whiskey to be born? Or does he age his own, impatiently? After you cure the barrel for a few days with boiling hot water, you can pour country moonshine into this charred oak mini-barrel, and it will age quickly into country whiskey—your own special cask of whiskey, aged to your tastes.

Just note that a small barrel imparts flavors way faster than a big barrel, because of the ratio of surface area to volume. (Math, bro.) So within even a month you can add a whole lot of oakiness to a spirit, including gin or vodka or tequila—but getting the complex caramels and vanilla and all that will still require patience, and months. But whatever arrives from this barrel, it will be yours. It will be a special spirit you made in the garage. I know no whiskey manlier than the whiskey you made in your garage.

Are you still using electricity to make espresso? Pressing buttons? Go off-grid. Pump your own instead. The Flair is a man-powered espresso machine, with a large lever that lets you self-generate the 9 bars of pressure needed to make good espresso. There's a chamber for your grounds. There's a chamber on top of that for hot water. Fill them up, and pull down on the handle—using a pressure gauge for a guide like the gauge on a High Striker carnival strongman game. Thick, crema-topped espresso will result. Want to double up on muscle? Here's my favorite hand grinder, the Kingrinder K6 ($109), for perfect espresso powder.

Shaving ain't manly shaving unless it's sharp on your neck. A Leaf Thorn single-blade safety razor (8/10, WIRED Recommends) offers what they call in the barber trade an “aggressive” shave, the kind of risk that breeds reward. The reward is skin that's baby-smooth. It is the skin of competence and elegant aggressiveness. Of men who know from shaving. It's the shave you expect George Clooney might exact in O, Brother, Where Art Thou?

Who needs tepid pizza peppers when you can have Carolina Reaper pizza peppers, ghost pepper chili shake, and peppers named for scorpions? Whether outrageous heat or merely big flavor, these pepper flake mixes from Flatiron Pepper Co. are multiple orders of magnitude more amped than basic red pepper bits—running the gamut from an “I Can't Feel My Face” capsaicin dare to a full-throated Hatch-habanero chili mix whose intensity arrives mostly as flavor. Barbecue sauce and hot sauce are a merely basic manosphere obsession. Nuclear-level chili flakes is god-tier. These turn pizza into bragging rights, and salad into pain. It's a gift made for every brother-in-law you've got. The four-pepper blend with habanero, ghost, jalapeno, and chile de arbol has so much flavor and heat it makes your tired pizza shake cower in shame.

My wife found this in a store and bought it for me a joke because it says "manly man smell like tree" on the box, which, I mean, you have to buy that. Sometimes a thing that seems like joke turns out not to be. Like this guide. The Last Call Shampoo bar is the same way—there's a jokey element here and it's fun, but it's also a great bar of soap. Or shampoo. Or whatever you want it to be, really.

I'm what you might call a minimalist when it comes to all things grooming-related. I have a beard; I have never put anything on it. If I've ever used conditioner in my hair, it was by accident. You get the idea. I don't see why I should need a bar of shampoo and a bar of soap, so to me, this thing is everything in one neat little package that lasts quite a while, doesn't have any plastic packaging, and is even cheaper than most shampoo bars I've seen. Try it, you'll like it. And you'll smell like a fresh, clean tree. —Scott Gilbertson

The GoRuck GR1 is an incredibly comfortable pack, but don't hold that against it. Throw in a 30 lb Ruck Plate ($89), and somewhere around the 100-mile mark in your ruck, you should begin to sweat blood. The GR1 is a bomb-proof pack, possibly literally, but that's probably classified. The outside of the pack is made of 1,000-denier Cordura (for comparison, most of the outdoor industry gets by with 210, maybe 500 if a company is trying to man up). Here's what we know: if the GR1 is manly enough for former SEALs and Green Berets, it's manly enough for the man you're giving a gift. —Scott Gilbertson

Manly men do things the hard way, then spend even more time telling you why the hard way is the best way. They don't go squirting premade shaving foam on themselves, if they can lather their own foam. Foam that smells like sandalwood and cedar. Foam that repels moths. A brush and marble shave bowl—heavy, sturdy, and handsome—is a classic man-thing from another time. Lathering this bowl with shave soap is like performing an ancient man-ritual, channeling the spirits of the Greatest Generation. After years of spurning spray foam that smells like bad gin, this ritual is now mine too. Note that Supply's shave soap is dense and utilitarian. But for a really, really extravagant lather? Try this shave bar from Leaf ($18).

Some companies try to be subtle when marketing products aimed at grooming your junk, with euphemisms like “Look your best, all over.” Then there's BALLS. Cofounded by Matt Edge and Tyler Ball (what are the odds?), this company makes electric razors like the Archibald trimmer ($69) specifically aimed at trimming hair in hard-to-trim places.

What makes this different from a typical razor? It’s completely waterproof, so you can even use it in the shower. It also has a small LED under the razor, so you can better see what you’re doing down where the sun doesn’t shine. Beyond that, the razor performs pretty well in terms of shaving without nicking sensitive skin, which would be enough to recommend it without all the bells and whistles. —Eric Ravenscraft

It's a bottle of lube in the shape of a bullet. How much more manly can you get? Indeed, the company's YouTube channel leans heavily into advising men doing manly things, like laying pipe and cooking sausages. Thankfully, this lube is quite viscous and even made it into our Best Lubes guide. —Eric Ravenscraft