Why I Find Beards Weird

I feeL fortunate to have found my life mate in the brief era between 1910 and 1990 when it was unfashionable for men to have beards, because I like a clean-shaven man, as I like a pruned rose garden: Nature teeming, but kept at bay.

- Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Today’s 20-something english rose has to feel or kiss her way through tundras of scratchy facial hair. Beards are everywhere: not the bushy W. G. Grace kind, but the ‘urban’ seven-day growth, sported by everyone from footballers to classical musicians. I fear we’ve reached a tipping-point when less than half of the male population shaves first thing in the morning as a matter of course.

Why this eruption? Is it that it’s harder for men to acquire the traditional trappings of adulthood—job for life, owning a house —and a beard is an easy way to signal ‘I really am an adult’? Beards certainly make a man look older: a 30 year old looks 50 and a 50 year old 80. everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, the same as with long hair over the ears in the 1970s—perhaps today’s beards will soon look as dated as Donny Osmond hair now does.

The signals beards give off have changed beyond measure since the 1970s, when the few beardies tended to be scientists at the Open University or village Methuselahs. Today’s beards give off more of an ‘I’m a Nespressodrinking graphic designer in Shoreditch’ aura.