I remember there being a period in my mid-teens, a brief window, when I wasn't yet so hormonally supercharged that I needed to shave but I did have enough of whatever juice it is that makes a young man want to tackle 19th-century Russian literature.
It didn't last long but hey, that's youth all over, isn't it?
I mention this because there's a lot of facial hair in Russian literature and, not being a shaver then, I was always slightly perplexed when this or that character's beard would be deemed worthy of description. Surely a beard's a beard, thought the beardless teenage me. They're all very much the same, aren't they? You either have one or you don't, and if you do, it'll look very much like the one on the next Karamazov brother or vodka-soaked Cossack horseman.
Then I grew up and grew a beard and realised that actually there is a very marked tonsorial pecking order where facial hair is concerned and if you are at the wispy, patchy, Thom Yorke-y end of the spectrum (I am) you're what the Russians would call "nichtozhestvo": a nonentity. (The other crosses I bear alongside wispyness, for the record, are a big bald patch under my chin - left side - and hideously asymmetric growth on my throat. There, now you know.)
But even if I am still occasionally prey to what's known as beard envy, I have learned to live with my deficiencies. However an increasing number of men are saying: "No. I want more from my beard and I am prepared to undergo a moderately painful procedure, incur the ridicule of the media and pay a facial hair transplant specialist upwards of £5000 in order to get it."
It's true. In New York, where the bearded hipster look is de rigueur for young men, there has been a marked increase in patients attending clinics which will do all this. The process involves three hours of precise incisions as hairs are taken from under the chin and placed, one by one, on the cheeks. It'll take up to 700 of these transplants if you want a full goatee but at the end of the process you have the beard of your dreams - or the beard of your partner's dreams, if he/she is a fan of George Clooney. Moreover your new beard will grow naturally and you can shave it into any shape you fancy - even a Tolstoy-like curtain of furze which will hang down over your chest (that's the other place on your body that can be "mined" for hairs. They don't go any lower, thankfully.)
Of course when the craze for beards recedes and the clean-shaven look returns, which it's bound to do at some point, we're going to look back on all this and think it very silly indeed. Until then, just try to be happy with the beard nature gave you.
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