One day when my older son was a toddler, he noticed I had a few days’ worth of scruff on my face. He pointed to the little dark specs he saw, and declared, “Ants!”
From that day forward, that’s what we all called my facial hair. Ants. “Daddy has ants.” And now daddy has a swarm of ants. A goddamned colony.
See, I have trouble with the whole idea of beards.
This is curious as I am currently sporting one, and not for the first time in my life. But to be sure, it has been an exception to an otherwise clean-shaven rule.
Let us put aside for now the fact that the growth of facial hair is “natural” and built into our species, along with just about all other mammals. I know. But we live in an age in which it is entirely optional to allow it to grow. Many, many other things that humans naturally produce we readily take measures to remove, such as showering to rid ourselves of our stink, clipping our fingernails and toenails to manageable lengths, and, oh yes, cutting the hair on the tops of our heads. Not to mention natural, bodily-generated things like cancerous tumors.
Facial hair serves no meaningful purpose. It has no utility. Perhaps if you’re living in an arctic climate in which one must greedily retain every fraction of a calorie of warmth to stave off hypothermia, something like a beard makes a difference, if for not other reason than as an extra layer of wind shielding. But for most people in civilization, even the bushiest of beards isn’t doing all that much to keep anyone meaningfully warm.
Having facial hair, however, can be like playing host to tens of thousands of little tendrils that pick up dust, dirt, crumbs, and—perhaps worst of all—moisture and keep it close to some pretty important orifices and bodily points of ingress. Imagine you drop a toothbrush onto the floor in between your washing machine and dryer (yes this has happened to me), or imagine a kid’s stuffed animal gets stuck behind your couch where you haven’t vacuumed in a while because really you can be bothered—it’s not like anyone eats off the floor there. You know when you pick up that toothbrush or that stuffed animal and it’s covered in wads of dust or mysterious crud, the provenance of which you dare not speculate? That’s a beard just going through the world.
Every time I eat, I can feel the remnants of whatever I’ve consumed frosting the tips of the hairs around the mouth. God help me if whatever I was eating is at all sticky. Inadvertently tasting the residue of food from a meal you thought was now in the past, that room-temperature tang of something you once had consumed but now have moved on from and gone on with the rest of your life, it’s jarring and unpleasant regardless of how much you might have liked the meal of origin. It’s like, dum-de-dum, going about my evening, and WHAT THE HELL, PAPRIKA? ON MY FACE? If I didn’t have facial hair, I could conceivably lick my lips and be done with it. But now I’m hyperaware of the biomatter commingling with the hairs surrounding my mouth, along with whatever else the aforementioned filth-tendrils have since picked up in its tour through our world of pollutants, so I’ll be damned if my solution is to re-consume this new mystery compound on my face.
So now every time I eat, be it meal, snack, or dessert, I must now also wash my face afterward. Great. Another task.
Speaking of tasks: One would think that one of the benefits of letting my beard grow is that I no longer have to deal with the inconvenience of shaving every couple of days. Different people have different levels of tolerance for how clean-shaven they need to be, and of course people’s hair grows at different rates. For me to be truly clean-shaven, I have to shave at least every couple of days, but in actuality, when I’m going beardless I probably shave once every three or four days and go a couple days sporting a stubbly look which, let’s just assume for now, is dead sexy.
“Ants!”
Shaving absolutely sucks. Again, I know the experience is different for different people in terms of how difficult or uncomfortable shaving can be, and much depends on one’s approach—straight razors versus electric razors and so on. With over three decades experience of involuntarily having hair sprout from my face, I have landed on disposable razors and shaving cream. My hair happens to be pretty goddamn tough; instead of thinking of it like mowing a lawn, shaving for me is more like taking a push power to a forest of oak trees. These follicles make some thick (or as the kids say, “THICC”) goddamn hairs. The point is that it takes some significant time and effort for me to get clean-shaven, and I inevitably wind up with nicks and cuts or soreness. And I do not like any of those things because I am a sensitive, delicate flower with very big feelings and a staggeringly low threshold for pain.
So in this case, having a beard is a great idea! No shaving! No unnecessary “ows”!
FALSE.
Now, some bearded folks just let those hairs live their best life. My dad was among them toward the end of his life, sporting the David Letterman (post-Late Show) look, just letting it all grow freely into a Santa-Clausey avalanche of beardiness. But for my purposes, let us assume that the vibe we’re going for is not “wolfman,” and instead we’d like a more cultivated look. For me, that means, for one, no neck-beard. So I have to shave my neck about as often as I used to shave my full face. And I don’t know how much your neck likes having sharp metal repeatedly scraped over it, but mine does not. Plus, my beard doesn’t exactly grow with exactly the same fullness on every spot on my face, so I also have to do some spot-trimming around the upper cheeks. It’s definitely better than having to shave my entire face, but I still have to shave.
And of course, that’s not the end of it. I’m not looking to have a beard that someone could pull on (because of course they would, the bastards), and even more importantly, I cannot stand—CANNOT STAND–the feeling of mustache hairs reaching down onto my lips, like little bug legs trying to skitter into my mouth. Gah. No. Length must be maintained through regular trimming.
Oh, the goddamn trimming.
Now look, I’m not made of money, but I bought myself a beard trimmer that was well-reviewed and on the pricer side for my economic situation. And I oil it regularly and brush out its blades and clean the guards and blah blah blah whatever else it says in the instruction manual. And yet every time I run that bastard over my beard there are inevitably yanks and pulls on beard hairs, and folks I am here to tell you I think I would rather get a shaving cut for every hair yanked by a trimmer. I mean holy SHIT that hurts, such that sometimes I have to stop and take a breather so I don’t go into a full fight-or-flight freakout and either run from my bathroom or take a hammer to the trimmer while frothing at the mouth. Which then gets all over my half-trimmed beard. It’s not a good scene.
So that sucks. And of course the fun isn’t over once the shaving and trimming are done. Because of course trimming one’s tiny little beard hairs means the discarded hair detritus is now somewhere else.
I have whole preparation ritual for a beard trimming which involves removing all items from my bathroom sink, covering the sink and surrounding surface area with either newspaper or some other thing, shaped in a vaguely concave way in order to serve as a hair-collecting tarp, and removing the little rug next to the sink. This setup is great in that it catches about .002 percent of the hair that comes off from trimming. The other 8 trillion percent of these tiny tree-stump filaments of hair seems to find its way onto every surface and into every corner and crevice within a 9-mile radius. It’s under the tarp, of course. It’s in the sink and threatening to clog up the drain. It’s flecked across the bathroom mirror. It’s on the faucet, it’s under the faucet knob, it’s in between the faucet and the wall. It’s on the floor. And, of course, it’s all over me. It’s just fucking everywhere.
So I gingerly remove any outer layers of clothes and try not to fling too much hair shrapnel around the already-assaulted bathroom, carefully shake or brush them out onto the remarkably clean tarp, and place the items in the washing machine. I, now probably in my underwear and with microhairs all over my face and hands, then gently pick up the tarp, walk heel-to-toe like I learned in marching band so I don’t spill anything, and dump what little hair it caught into the trash. After discarding the tarp, I walk back to the bathroom—noticing of course how I have hairs on the bottoms of my feet and am probably tracking them around the house—and proceed to clean the sink, mirror, and all surrounding municipalities of hair shavings, and then sweeping or vacuuming the bathroom floor. And probably the hallway floor too, because of the tracked hair from my feet. Only then to I get into the shower and wash the remaining flotsam and jetsam from my face and body.
But hey, now I look all nice and groomed!
And here’s the real thing that bothers me about having a beard: it’s feeling it all the time. Maybe if you’re someone with softer, fluffier hair, you experience your beard as pleasant, like you’re always being nuzzled by a bunny. That’s lovely! My beard feels more like I’ve strapped a feedbag made of steel wool to my face. It’s always there. Remember how annoyed we all got having to wear N95 face masks all the time? It’s like that, but the mask is made of splinters.
And being a stim-crazed, sensorily tender, autistic nutcase, I absolutely have to fuss with my beard all the time, always scratching at it or tugging at hairs in one specific spot, which will probably result in an ugly bald patch on one side of my chin at some point. I can’t leave it the hell alone.
Because it won’t leave me alone! It’s always there, reminding me it’s there.
Oh man, and when the weather is hot and humid? Forget it. Imagine undergoing physical exertions on a humid 90-degree day, but you’ve wrapped an itchy sweater around your mouth. A beard won’t stop you from being cold, but it will definitely make being hot more miserable.
So why, why on Zod’s blighted Earth, would I sport a beard, even as I type this?
I bet you know part of the answer, at least. It doesn’t look half bad. I don’t think it does any particular wonders for my appearance, mind you, but it does lend at least a hint of vaguely masculine maturity to a face that is otherwise, let’s say, guileless. And as a short guy who usually has an anxious sort of please-don’t-pick-on-me expression, the beard helps. “He that hath a beard is more than a youth,” as the good lady of Messina says. I’m 46 now, and most of my facial hair is gray, but there are patches of dark brown that form a weird ladle-looking shape across my jaw that I’m not crazy about, but it’s fine.
But the primary reason I have the beard is that my girlfriend really likes it. She insists—firmly!—that she is not less attracted to me when I am clean-shaven, but she is definitely more attracted to me when I have the beard, so you do the nonsensical math there. She’s pretty amazing, and there’s not a lot I wouldn’t do for her, and I want her to feel prioritized and, of course, to feel fluttery about her boyfriend.
That’s why I have the beard. But I don’t at all understand why she likes it. Why does she want to be kissed by a steel wool feedbag? Why does she want to nuzzle with a mask of splinters? I really don’t know. But she does.
I’m naturally also puzzled by other people’s beards and facial hair. Aren’t they annoyed by all that, you know, stuff all over their faces? Don’t they feel gross about it? Don’t they ever just stop for second and think, in horror, Holy shit there’s all this hair all over my face! Aren’t their partners irritated by it? It’s all just so much fuss and work, just one more thing to think about and deal with that requires attention and maintenance and, ugh, styling. Don’t we all have enough going on as it is?
And yet here I am, beard and all. I don’t hate it, and yet, I also hate it. I think it looks pretty good, and yet I think it looks ridiculous. I think it’s perfectly normal for me to have a beard, and yet I think it’s patently absurd and even a little disgusting. I think it’s kind of interesting to the touch, and yet I think it’s like being covered in bugs.
Like being covered in ants.
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Update, November 2024: I got rid of the beard a couple of weeks after posting this. So more ants.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
Near-Earth Object 