Matas Men

Matas Men is a Danish men's grooming line sold by Matas, Denmark's largest health and beauty retailer. It is not an independent company but a private-label range, part of the broader Matas Striber family of own-brand products. The line covers skincare, shaving, beard care, body care and fragrance, and is positioned as a simple, accessible routine for men, with a recurring emphasis on fragrance-free formulas for sensitive skin.

The range is distributed exclusively through Matas's own channels in Denmark — its roughly 264 stores and the matas.dk web shop — and remains in active development, with new products such as a Matas Striber Men face serum introduced in the line in 2026. Because it is a house brand rather than a standalone company, it has no separate corporate identity, founders or website of its own.

Matas Men grew out of Matas Striber, the retailer's private-label umbrella, which according to the company's own history page was introduced in 1949, the same year Matas itself was founded. The first Matas products developed specifically for men reached the shelves in the late 1980s [6]. The exact launch year is not published; Matas describes the start only as "the end of the 80s."

Sources differ on when the parent company began. Matas dates its founding to 1949, a year confirmed by both the corporate Matas Group portfolio and Wikipedia, which records the company as established in Copenhagen on 13 November 1949 under the name Materialisternes Aktieselskab [8]. The Danish men's-grooming retailer Made4Men instead states that Matas was "established in the 1960s" and that the men's products followed about twenty years later [11]; this earlier-founding figure conflicts with the company's own record and the encyclopedic sources, which place the founding in 1949.

Matas Men belongs to Matas A/S, the listed retailer headquartered in Allerød, Denmark, and part of Matas Group. The parent company's ownership has changed more than once. In 2006 Matas was sold to the private-equity firm CVC Capital Partners for 5.2 billion Danish kroner [8]. It later returned to public ownership, listing on the Nasdaq OMX Copenhagen stock exchange in 2013 [9]. In 2023 Matas Group acquired the Nordic beauty chain KICKS, with 226 stores across Sweden, Norway and Finland, a move the company frames as making it a Nordic market leader [10]. The KICKS chains operate their own private label, however, and do not carry Matas Men; distribution of the Matas Men range stays within Denmark.

Matas Men is built on the idea that men's skincare need not be complicated. The company develops the products with male skin in mind, noting that men's skin is thicker and coarser than women's and that men tend to dislike greasy, sticky creams. Across the range, Matas says it consistently excludes ingredients it regards as critical, and the line is offered at prices the retailer describes as accessible to all consumers.

To organise its 40-plus products, the line uses a colour-coded structure: a dark-blue series for normal skin, a light-blue fragrance-free series for sensitive skin, a grey fragrance-free series for blemish-prone skin, and a brown series for beard care and shaving. The men's assortment within Matas Striber spans face care, body care, aftershave, beard products, shaving foams and gels, deodorants, hair styling and an eau de toilette.

Signature items include the Matas Men Face Cream for sensitive skin in a fragrance-free formula, a 24-hour moisturising face cream, and the Matas Men Anti-Age 3-in-1 Eye Gel, which uses a metal-ball applicator for a cooling effect and contains the active ingredients Haloxyl, Matrixyl Morphomics and creatine. A lightweight Matas Striber Men Invisible Fluid Face Cream with SPF 30 is marketed with moisture protection of up to 72 hours. Formulas across the line draw on vitamins B3, B5 and E, hyaluronic acid, aloe vera, glycerin, creatine and plant extracts, with UVA/UVB filters in selected products.

Matas markets the men's products as fragrance-free, certified by the Nordic Swan Ecolabel, allergy-certified, vegan and produced in Denmark [7]. These commitments sit within a longer record at the parent company: Matas Natur became the first Nordic Swan Ecolabel skincare line in the Nordic region in 1997, and the Matas Striber sun-care series was the first ecolabelled sun protection in the region in 2006. The retailer states a goal of offering at least one Nordic Swan Ecolabelled option in every product category [10]. The men's range also avoids parabens, phthalates and the 26 fragrance substances known to cause allergies, according to a profile by the retailer Made4Men.

In 2016 a Matas Men anti-age face gel for sensitive skin was nominated for a Danish Beauty Award [12]. Both the company's own history page and Made4Men report further Danish Beauty Award nominations for the line's beard-care and eye products over the following years, though the specific categories are not all individually documented.

The line is active. As of 2026 it is marketed on matas.dk with continued product development, including a new face serum added that year. Its scope remains single-country, tied to the Matas retail brand in Denmark rather than the wider Matas Group network.