Susie Rushton: Beauty queen

Men, apparently, are six-and-a-half times more likely to wax their cars each month than moisturise their bodies – so there are a lot of chaps out there with very scaly legs driving squeaky-clean cars. This is not an accusation one can fling at Lawrence Dallaglio, newly retired from international rugby and now the "face" of Vaseline MEN, a range of skin care and cleansing products apparently aimed at the proudly non-metrosexual guy.

If anyone can get flaky male consumers to embrace pleasantly hydrated skin – making them, in turn, more pleasant to embrace – it should be the combination of the former England captain and everybody's favourite petroleum jelly. To test this proposition, I handed out some samples to a selection of men and asked them for their responses. There are three types of body and face wash, two body lotions and a hand cream – none topping £3.50. I must report that feedback was mixed. The cleansers were dismissed as "smelling like Lynx", having a texture "like a cream rather than a gel – too dribbly", and "aimed at the kind of bloke who wants to use the same thing to wash his face as his muddy knackers". Get them! By contrast, the hand lotion was "incredibly effective: my hands were protected all day".

With its 130-year-old heritage, it seems remiss of Vaseline's owners, Unilever, not to have extended this range with neutral fragrance and packaging based on the slightly clinical appearance of its core product, rather than imitating Castrol GTX for looks and Lynx for smell. For the sake of accuracy, I shouldn't include the body lotion in that review, because I couldn't actually persuade anyone to try it out – and that wasn't because they were otherwise engaged with a chamois leather. Apparently.

Vaseline MEN, from supermarkets and pharmacies nationwide