Son
Buying for your son should be easy. It’s one of those things that you should be able to crack straight out of the park, but for some reason never is. It’s simple when they’re little. It’s stressful when they’re teens. It’s existential when they’re adults with opinions and lives of their own. You stand there sweating in the middle of the shops wondering when that happened and whether he’d technically accept a gift card. He would. We have confirmed as much.
That’s why we put this together. We get it, we know how tricky it can be that point between ‘wanting to buy the perfect present’ and ‘just buying them a f * cking pair of socks.’ It’s a chasm most times. The thing is: it’s never that you don’t love him. It’s that buying stuff for the person you love is hard. Translation. You understand your son about as well as any person on this planet. But knowing your son and knowing what to buy your son are two incredibly different things. Especially with how shops want to sell you stuff these days.
That’s why everything we’ve picked for this edit has been chosen with your relationship with your son in mind. Not just their age or affordability. We mean the fabric of your connection. The sassy teen son who thinks he wants nothing but gleams when you surprise him and actually get it right. The son who just moved into his first flat but has nothing on his walls or a decent knife in the kitchen. The older son who you suddenly find is harder to buy for than he used to be. But is still your son.
We’ve been obsessive about what we include here. So many things seem like a good idea in a gift guide and are useless come present-day. We care about the stuff he’s going to actually use, keep, brag about to his mates. We want the gifts that land instead of the ones he’ll immediately hide in a drawer.
Some of these picks are straightforwardly useful. Some are things he’ll mock you for buying but secretly love. None of it was put into this list until we personally gave it a seal of approval with the question: would I buy this for my son? If the answer was no, we took it out. We stand behind every one of these items.
Buying for your son is worth the effort. We hope we’ve made that effort that little bit easier.