Why I don’t get beards

Beards. You know them. You see them. They dominate your friends’ faces. But with beards comes an important question – just why?

Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ape-like biological ancestors were covered near enough head to toe in hair. These creatures were primitive, uncivilised beings: the kind of beings that would eat lice from inside their ears. With time came the evolution of the Homosapien, a species with a significant reduction in the amount of bodily hair compared to our ancestors. We are now an advanced species that have sent men to the moon and are thinking about colonising Mars.

Yet for some odd reason over the last couple of years, many members of our civilisation are now reverting to the fashion displayed by our lice-eating ancestors in an attempt to cover their faces with their own body hair. It’s very bizarre.

Surely a sign of an advanced, intelligent, compassionate species of creatures wouldn’t involve holding onto styles displayed literally hundreds of thousands of years ago by a bunch of cave dwellers?

It’s more than just this that makes beards so questionably shit: having a beard has become an almost ironic symbol of “individualism” – there’s an emerging trend to have the most unkempt and rogue beard possible simply to show that you have your own style and don’t abide by the fashion mainstream. How edgy and original.

It’s worth mentioning that beards serve no practical purpose. Why would you want to invite last night’s spilt beverages to stay on your face any longer than required? Beard owners might retort by saying beards provide them with a cosy sense of warmth. Yet surely you could just lose the beard and get a fucking scarf?

Perhaps the most insulting part of beards comes with a subtle point maybe many men don’t think about. The fact that the unkempt beard style has become more and more of mainstream fashion enforces a standard of rogue, tough masculinity that simply doesn’t fit into the mould of many of us guys. It idealises the image of the wild, rough manly man, stating that this is fashionable because this is how guys are supposed to be. Which simply isn’t true for most of us. And for those of us who biologically don’t have the capability to grow a huge beard, we are literally the butt of jokes suggesting that we are less masculine and less appealing than those who can. Which, again, isn’t necessarily true by any means. Why does being masculine have to be reduced to having pubes on your face?