Last night I saw (from a distance) a guy I used to be friends with in the 90’s. He came to my parties, played cards, charmed my female friends and my sister even, because he was very handsome for Whitey in a kind of rough around the edges, northern European way.
Now he has a beard down to his navel and long grey-speckled hair collected on top of his head in a bun. He looks 20 years older than he is, and 30 years older than he could have looked if he’d kept on shaving and had the occasional haircut.
Yes yes, so vanity is bad, but really? And in the heat? Can not understand, as my Japanese student, who also fancied him at the time, always used to say.
So I got thinking about facial hair, that scourge of mankind and my least favourite rodent, again. All right, so forget about heat, scratching and itching, little animals and food trapped in the thicket and the ugliness of it all. Forget about looking 20 years older and forever catapulting oneself out of the romance market.
I think men should shave because it’s only fair. I mean, we women have to shower, use skin products, blow-dry, anoint, put on make-up, primp, preen, bleach, inject, add breasts, scatter rose-petals all over ourselves and brush our teeth – every day.
Isn’t it then the least guys can do, to spend two to three minutes on something?
P.S. The beard in the photo is not that of the formerly handsome for whitey mentioned above – that guy’s beard really goes down to his navel! The beard above belongs to a man who is still a friend of mine, but at whom it would be so much easier to look if he got the old secaturs and Gilette out…
The kind of beard/long hair you describe is yuk, repulsive. I really don’t understand why some guys go for that, especially in a climate like HK. Except maybe as a reaction to Chinese glabrousness. But I do like to develop some of the old facial fungus from time to time, just to be different from the current trend to be completely shaved and sleek. I quite fancy getting meself a WW2 fighter pilot moustache actaully, or perhaps some Victorian Mutton Chops sideburns.
Just thank god then, that you are not a bearded woman!
I have seen some women who seem to enjoy cultivating a single strand of hair, emanating sometimes from a nodule of skin on their face. Instead of pulling this hair out, for some superstitious reason, they let it grow and grow, just like a man’s bear.
Strange, why do they do that?
Michael: That’s a fun and different thought (not) – but beware! Leave the thought in your brain and let it die a death. For this is what happens when you allow the fungus/thoughts to ferment as it were
http://www.skippys.no/english/firmaet.html
the man on this website was my first love. I was 7 and he was 14 so nothing came of it. And here we see the result of spurning my advances: The longest widest heaviest most ridiculous face-rodent this side of the Boer war! As described in my novel Blonde Lotus.
James: I think those women you have seen cultivating a single strand of hair are in fact men? Surely?
I can’t understand why otherwise decent looking blokes in their 30s shave their heads. That someone should wish to give themsleves the Belsen/Cancer Ward look is beyond me.
You probably have a full head of hair and nothing can be better than that. But if I were a man and suddenly saw a photo or a mirror image of myself with a piece of skin on the top of my head where there should be hair, I would also get out the shaving gear post haste.
Those otherwise decent-looking blokes are simply trying to draw attention to, I mean away from, the fact that they’re going BALD, instead of cultivating that bane of male beauty: The shiny head surrounded by a mote of hair lapping dirtily at the shirt collar.
The monkish look may have been cool in 1476; nowadays it just doesn’t cut it.
Today I saw a 50-something guy on the MTR with an orange and grey ring of hair starting just above the ears. Across the shiny pate was draped about 50 strands of dark brown hair, collected in a rope-like fashion to form a kind of hair sausage stretching from behind one ear to the other. Three other dark brown sausages hung neglected like so many discarded jump-ropes down his head, trailing down to his shoulder.
I hold his wife, who was sitting next to him, responsible. What are spouses for if not to save their partner’s last remnants of sartorial and cosmetic dignity? That guy should have started some serious head-shaving in his early 30’s and never stopped.