TrustedMens

About us

Two guys, a spreadsheet, and several thousand dollars of products we mostly regret.

TrustedMens started as a group chat about wasted money. It is now a review site with rules, a scoring sheet, and a policy of publishing the disappointing results too.

Marc Halden & David Ellison

Long-term testing · Research & scoring

How this started

In the spring of 2023, Marc added up what he had spent in four months on men’s health subscriptions he had found through Instagram ads. It came to a little over nine hundred dollars. Two of them did something. One did nothing at all. The fourth took three phone calls and, eventually, a chargeback to get out of.

He complained about it to David, who had done roughly the same thing with hair loss products, and the conversation that followed is basically this website: why is it so hard to find out, before you pay, whether one of these things actually works?

The honest answer is that most of the pages ranking for these products are written by people who have never used them. Some are content farms. Others are real writers working from a press release and a stock photo. Almost none of them tell you what month four looks like — when the introductory price expires and you find out how a company treats a customer who wants to leave.

So we started buying things and writing down what happened. That is the entire idea.

Who we are

Real names on every review.

MH

Marc Halden

Long-term testing

Marc is 41, lives outside Denver, and is the reason this site exists. In 2023 he spent about $900 across four months on men’s health subscriptions he found through Instagram ads. Two of them worked. One did nothing. One took him three phone calls and a chargeback to get out of.

He handles long-term testing: keeping a product running past the honeymoon period, tracking what changes at week 8 and week 20, and documenting exactly what happens when you try to cancel. Former warehouse operations manager, father of two, deeply mediocre runner.

DE

David Ellison

Research & scoring

David is 36 and handles the research side. He reads the actual studies a brand cites in its marketing, checks whether they say what the landing page claims they say, and digs through terms of service for auto-renewal traps and shipping games.

He also built the scoring sheet every product on this site runs through. Ex-freelance copywriter — which is exactly why he can smell a claim that was written to sound proven without being proven.

How we test

Same process, every product, no exceptions.

  1. We buy it like anyone else

    Retail price, our own card, no press contact, no reviewer discount. Where there is a free trial, we run it the way a normal person would — including letting it convert into a paid subscription.

  2. We use it for at least thirty days

    Usually much longer. Anything claiming to change your hair, your hormones, or your sleep gets a minimum of ninety days before we will write a verdict.

  3. We write it down as we go

    A dated log: what we noticed, what we did not, what went wrong, what support said when we emailed them. We do not reconstruct a review from memory four months later.

  4. We score it on the same five criteria

    Every product runs through the identical sheet, so a 7 on one review means the same thing as a 7 on another.

  5. We try to cancel

    Every subscription we test gets cancelled at the end, and we time it and document it. For a lot of these companies this is the most revealing thing in the entire review.

What we are not

We are not doctors, nurses, pharmacists or researchers, and we are careful never to write as though we were. Nothing on this site is medical advice, a diagnosis, or a treatment recommendation.

If a product we review needs a prescription, there is a licensed clinician somewhere in that process, and their opinion about whether it suits you matters and ours does not. What we can tell you is something they cannot: what it is actually like to be the customer — the wait, the packaging, the side effects nobody warned us about, the price in month seven, and how hard it is to stop.

How we pay for this

Some of the links on this site are affiliate links, which means we earn a commission if you buy through them. It costs you nothing extra, and it has never once changed a score, a ranking, or a verdict. No brand has seen a review before it went live and no brand ever will. The full version is here, including the things we refuse to do.

Corrections

If we get something wrong, we fix it and we say so at the top of the page with the date. If you have spotted an error, or you have had a very different experience with something we reviewed, tell us: hello@trustedmens.com. We read all of it, including the rude ones.