Beard of Hilarity +4

[davidn]

For a while, Whitney has been saying how good I'd look with a beard. I didn't believe it myself, and after a few failed efforts during fourth year of university where I just looked like I was in some dreadful nu-metal band, I gave up for a while, but as a first wedding anniversary present, I've tried again.

I have always hated shaving. I'm still genuinely afraid to use "real" hand razors for fear of peeling my skin off, and have used an electric one for as long as I remember, which does the job but doesn't give quite as close a shave, and it's awkward to get your face completely clean with one without leaving stupid-looking tufts of hair on the underside of your chin. You would think that after about ten years of cutting it off every day, facial hair would get the hint and stop trying to grow, but it still pushes out of my skin relentlessly. So I've let it form a sort of goatee thing. (I wasn't going for this because of the hideousness of the word, but that's what Whitney told me I had.)

This is what I look like. (We took about eight hundred photos, and the best one we got was one where my eyes were pointing in opposite directions - I am not a photogenic person.) I've actually got more used to the feeling of it on my face than I thought I would, but I'm still not entirely happy with the way that hair simply refuses to grow on one side of my mouth, making the beard into a strange C shape. And I don't know what colour it is - Whitney says it has red in it.

I'm not sure how long I'll keep it. Part of my aversion to beards is that it's so easy to get them wrong. I wasn't aware until Whitney told me that just having a moustache without a beard was known as a "molest-ache" in America (There's no way to spell that word that makes it pronounceable at first glance - I've gone for the one that sounds like an embarrassing pain rather than the one that sounds like you have a small burrowing creature on your upper lip.)

Beards make the face look very different, and a lot of the time, it seems that what you think works can just look appalling to other people. Perhaps I'm not looking at the right demographic here, but I know that Marco From Nightwish (hereafter referred to as King Forkbeard III) has a beard in a style that went out of fashion a couple of hundred years before the days of William the Conqueror. And Roy Khan managed the impressive feat of having an even more record-breakingly stupid beard for each album since "Karma".

But for the truly adventurous, you can't look further than this page.

Comments

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

After my initial awful ... failed facial hair in first year, I've decided to go for a goatee, which seems to work at the moment.

My friend Nicholas has got the unusual way of getting rid of all his facial hair with electric razors: he takes off a layer of skin with it. I'm not saying that's the best of moves, but he does it...

My all-time favourite insane beard is Alan Moore (http://www.readysteadybook.com/images/Alan_and_Melinda_by_Jose_Villarrubia.jpg), who can't have shaved in the last couple of decades.

Finally, to top this off, I came up with the perfect insult for this sort of thing: "It's the facial hair equivalent of a mullet". I just need to work out what to use that to refer to...

[jenny0.livejournal.com]

I think my favourites from that page are the unholy beard/moustache/sideburn/head hair amalgamations. That really shows commitment.

[pookatimes.livejournal.com]

Oh, I looked like that (well, with more hair) until a few minutes ago. (Though that was through laziness...)

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

Lose the moustache. I don't think that it works at all.

[mercuryanna.livejournal.com]

www.badmustacheclub.com (http://www.badmustacheclub.com)

DO YOU WANT TO JOIN??



That is my boyfriend on the left HA HA HA!!!

[mercuryanna.livejournal.com]

Oh whoops I used the wrong link!

[kjorteo]

I wouldn't go that far as saying you need to lose the mustache, but it does look a little out of place as it currently is. I think one problem is that your facial hair is longer than your real hair, and that messes everything up. You appear to keep your real hair short enough that it's more a soft layer of fuzz than anything else, while you let the beard and mustache grow long enough to look hard and distinct, or at least to assert themselves. They...should match, one way or the other.

Another problem is that you have a mustache and a goatee, when you should have one of those O-shaped combination unites. The mustache should never be distinct, ever. If a mustache isn't big enough, you look like Hitler; too big and you look like you're in gay porn. And balance is impossible to achieve because the windows actually overlap--I've seen mustaches that look like Hitler in gay porn. I would refrain from trying the mustache part until you're absolutely sure you can connect it with everything else.

[kjorteo]

Unites. That sounds like a combination of some sort of minion-level robot and a religious follower. Maybe a unit in a real-time strategy game in which you head a robot cult. You use your unites to gather...whatever resources a robot cult would need.

Er, but anyway.

[davidn]

The distinction between the two areas is most of the problem - it's actually quite a bit longer since that photo was taken, and it seems I just lack the testosterone to grow the necessary patches of hair on either side.

I just found out last night that Timo Tolkki wanted to call the middle track on Stratovarius "Hitler". Apparently that didn't go down too well with their record company in Berlin.

[opera-hat.livejournal.com]

I don't really think Americans can pretend to lead the world in taste in facial hair - one always seems to see middle-aged, Middle-West Americans with moustaches. On the subject of moustaches, though, have you seen this site?

http://www.handlebarclub.co.uk/

May I particularly draw your attention to the gallery, especially the chap in the Pickelhaube under "European members"

[davidn]

That is indeed a very impressive moustache - it looks like it's bordering on causing difficulty getting through doorways.

It's good to know that you're still around, by the way!