My son turned 10 recently and, like all boys with double digits on their side, he now needs his own hair gel. At least I think that's how his argument went: like a pint-sized Rumpole of the Bailey, he runs verbal rings round me these days. Anyway, I gave in and he's now the proud owner of something called Sculpt Force Flubber Gel. It comes in a trendy container that stands upside down so the lid is at the bottom, a bit like those newfangled ketchup bottles.

Of course in my day you bought a simple tub of green gloop which had a screw-on top and the words “Hair Gel” written on the side. There was no fancy packaging and not much to choose from in the way of competing brands. I'd love to say that back then Flubber was just a bad Disney film starring Robin Williams, but even that was still a decade and a half away. My day was the 1980s, when shorts were short (at least in Wham! videos), the odds on getting a Commodore 64 for Christmas were long and hair was so “up” it definitely needed gel.

As it is today, the buying of the stuff was a rite of passage. So was learning how to use it. And so was discovering that however much you put in, hair that was standing up in a cool punky tangle when you stood admiring yourself in the bathroom mirror would be sliding down your face in an unctuous and flammable knot by the time you reached the bus stop and sparked up your first Sobranie Black Russian (I was a poseur, so what?).

I imagine every other generation of teenagers went through something similar, even if the actual product itself changed from century to century. The ancient Egyptians, for instance, used fat (eurgh!) while in the Iron Age tree resin was preferred. I wonder what snappy names would have been applied to those products had Wella and Garnier been around to market them? And, hair being hair, I'm sure neither product worked very well.

I think also that each generation of men gets the hair styling product it deserves. In the very dapper first decades of the 20th century it was the wonderfully-named Brilliantine, invented by French perfumer Edouard Pinaud. By the time the uncouth 1950s rolled around, Brylcreem was the styling gloop of choice for the UK's teddy boys and rockers. And of course the 1970s, famously dubbed the decade that taste forgot, turned the whole thing on its head (sorry) and introduced hair spray for men. What possessed them to call it Cossack I will never know, but that's what they went with – and who can forget those adverts featuring former Queen Park Rangers and West Ham goalkeeper Phil Parkes, his luxurious locks (and probably his moustache too) licked back into shape by a quick scoosh of Cossack?

I guess my son's is the Flubber generation, then. Whatever. Like me and like many before me, they'll eventually learn that gel is a promise without a kiss – a tonsorial tease, but with a fancy name and a silly upside-down bottle.