Weird Beard

Normally I tend to be clean-shaven, due to my own preferences and those of my female partners, none of whom have been fans of beards or mustaches.  Occasionally, I’ve lapsed into furriness just out of boredom.  In the past, for brief periods of a few months at a time, e.g. law school and summer 2000, I did have a mustache, but I’ve never been keen on beards, and really can’t stand that affectation of goatees.  Back in the late 90s those were a huge fad, but fortunately not anymore.

After letting it grow for two weeks, I clowned around before shaving it off completely.  First I shaved my chin, which resulted in James Hetfield style mutton chops.  These have an undeniable nineteenth century flavor.  Then I shaved the middle of the upper lip, and voila:  WOLVERINE.  Ok, I’m not as svelte as Hugh Jackman, so in my case it was the SABRETOOTH.  And that lasted only as long as it took to take a cell pic and then shave it off.  While the hair growth I develop on the upper lip is substantial enough to form a real mustache, on the cheeks it’s more of an annoying and unattractive accumulation of reddish facial hair than a real beard. 

As a fad, facial hair has varied considerably.  The nineteenth  century seems to be the time when men were most adventurous about it and really went to town.  Abraham Lincoln chose the Amish-style beard with no mustache.  His hapless General Burnside let the hair on his cheeks grow, thus “sideburns”.  Various handlebar mustaches, Kaiser Bill waxed mustaches, and chin beards also came out.  Baron Haussmann had this bizarre deal of letting it grow under the chin but shaving north.  I really can’t fathom that.  Was Madame Haussmann a fan?  Who knows. 

Baseball player Rollie Fingers has been the most contemporary advocate of handlebar mustaches.

WWI seems to have put paid to the beard fad which had been going on since the second half of the nineteenth century: primarily because the best gas masks wouldn’t seal firmly against the face unless the soldier was clean shaven.  By WWII, mustaches had fallen out of favor, except for Hitler’s square (oddly, I see little evidence that other Nazis copied him!) and those awful pencil thin ones.

I see Kurt Warner has finally kicked the “permanent fuzz” look he used to prefer when QB’ing the Rams back in 2000.  I haven’t seen George Michael lately; but Chris O’Donnell is waving the fuzz flag now on “NCIS: L.A.” 

Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill have kept their long, dwarvish beards:  oddly, drummer Frank Beard (!) is the only beardless one in ZZTop; he only has a mustache.  Hill is only distinguishable from Gibbons by being shorter and missing 2 strings on his instrument.

A few years ago The Edge expropriated the Fu Manchu (mustache extending down to the chin) previously favored by Elliot Gould in the movie version of M*A*S*H but also Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, who has been clean shaven for decades now.  For most of Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi had a thick mustache and probably the coolest specimen thereof.  Nietzsche and David Crosby are the biggest "bushy mustache" examples I can imagine.

Finally, Frank Zappa was the only one I know of – aside from perhaps die hard fans – to keep a Hitler mustache on the chin below the mustache itself.