Beard Jealousy or How I Learned to Hate the Beard or Some True Facts About the Beard

I can’t grow a beard. For me, facial hair is a fluffy, mostly transparent blonde-red nuisance that stakes its claim in the area under my chin and around my neck. It comes through in patches and likes to encroach out from my sideburns down along my cheekbones. Sometimes I’ll have a wispy little moustache, which can only be described as floppily disappointing.

I understand that this is the unfortunate side effect of being outrageously blonde—as in touched by the sun angelic blonde, perfectly framing my face in the manner of a curly halo. Trust me, my hair is glorious. But it is not conducive to growing a beard. Which is not to say that other blondes cannot grow facial hair, because they can—I’ve seen all manner of debonair blonde beards, perfectly manicured to frame the jaw, or wild growths just let loose in a strange heavily golden tangle. However, I do question the authenticity of these blondes’ blonde-ness. It is likely their genes are corrupted somewhere by a bit of brunette, black, or perhaps even red, which lends their hair a substance of colour and thickness completely absent from my own blonde purity.

….

(This is all starting to sound dangerously Nazi-ish: supreme race sort of stuff. But I’d be lying if I didn’t think that was true. Not the Nazi, Aryan part, but the supremacy of my genetic makeup. Makes sense, really.)

Anyway, back to beards and why I detest them and why the mythology that has recently been built up around them is an utter fallacy. Yes, I cannot grow one. And, yes, that would seem to imply that my stance is hardly subjective; that it may be informed by a certain rather blatant jealousy which is actually indirectly criticising and drawing attention to my own inadequacies. BUT, despite the physical context of my personal circumstance, I truly am only here to let you know some important facts about beards of which there has been a huge and worrying proliferation over the last few years. I just don't see how we have much space left for all these extra appendages (and, yes, I think there is something sort of erectly phallic about beards).

The bearded community is trapped in an enclosed loop of self-validation that consistently overlooks society’s distrust of their faces. They see squinted eyes and turning away as a gesture of respect, where it is only an awkward attempt to not look at them too closely. Even if it is a pencil-like beard lining the jaw or a neat little Freddy Mercury moustache, it is still a contribution to the troublesome and misguided beard tradition. They preen about, stroking and ‘carefully’ maintaining their beards/goatees/moustaches/whiskers, but they can’t see the follicle through the hair. And, more importantly, they cannot see that bit of pie, still lingering near their bottom lip, from last week.

The Facts About Beards and Why They’re Ultimately Not As Cool As You Think They Are

1. When people stroke your beard, they are not stroking it to get a sense of its texture or thickness, but to remove some of the dust and grime which has accumulated in its magnetic bristles.
2. You don't look more intelligent when you stroke your beard. You look like a constipated self-grooming monkey who misses other monkeys to do the grooming for you.
3. Touching them is never as nice as you think it is. They are prickly and invasive things. You may hide behind it like a mask, but really you are just asserting your own insecurity by always leading with it—jutting it out as this impressive furry growth that, in all honesty, just gets in the way and gets hair in things.
4. You always look like you are hiding something beneath a beard. What? Maybe your fear? Perhaps a pimple? Probably some carefully stashed food for hard times.
5. Your beard, however carefully trimmed, is almost always lopsided. Plus, it inevitably accentuates the size of your head. With this lop-sidedness and the illusion of your huge head, needless to say, you’re significantly less attractive with a beard.
6. Quite often people mistake you for heading to Star Wars convention as either a Wookie or an Ewok.
7. It may keep your face a little warmer in winter, but we've all noticed how the trapped sweat of this warmth has created a handy little rash around your chin.
8. Of course beards bring you closer to nature—gives you a questionable wild man sort of vibe—but, really, that is only because you are cultivating your own inviting ecosystem for migratory birds looking for a warm, rashy spot to rest.
9. Indeed, the image of the bearded wild man is pure propaganda to excuse a lack of ingenuity to shave in the wild. They’re called sharp stones. Bearded tools.
10. Contrary to bearded opinion, you are not suddenly possessed of a set of ‘beard related’ skillswith a beard—primarily bear and wild pig hunting. The greatest skill you acquire in growing a beard is the skill not to care enough about your physical appearance to tend that fungus on your face.
11. They are not aero-dynamic and you are making riding your fixed-gear bike that much harder by having a beard.
12. The Beards are, at best, an ordinary band.
13. Famous people throughout history with beards or prominent moustaches were or are generally dicks. Grizzly Adams? Arsehole. Lenin? Better blokes have existed. Hulk Hogan? Less said the better. Gandalf? Arrogant tosser. And don’t get me started on Tom Selleck.
14. When they get wet, it looks like you’ve drowned a rat with a fro and glued it to your face.
15. Coffee actually tastes better without beard hair in it.
16. They are a dangerous conduit for static electricity. We need less static electricity in the world. This is just basic environmental physics. Like cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions, we need to tax beards to discourage their growth.