Prince William (Image: PA)
beard is back in the news amid claims that his “macho stubble” is causing a flurry of inquiries about facial hair transplants from young men unable to match its thickness and ruggedness.
A little while ago, the heir to the throne spoke of having shaved his beard off because his daughter Charlotte didn’t like it and had broken down in “floods of tears” about his hairy face. Apparently, he has now talked her round. As an exponent of the clean-shaven look all my life, I really wish he hadn’t.
Because having patiently waited for at least 20 years for beards to go back out of fashion, I am now having to contemplate the awful truth that they never will. The natural order of things – the smartness of the clean-shaven look – has been permanently shunted aside. For us pogonophobiacs (the official term for those with a severe aversion to beards) these are difficult days indeed.
In my view the movie Gangs of New York, released in 2002 and starring and , must shoulder much of the blame for transforming the image of facial hair in popular culture. Suddenly it stopped being an indicator of scruffiness and became cool, or “hipster” as I remember a younger relation telling me at the time. That fashionable youth is now well into his 40s and still happy to be a stranger to the shaving razor.
I once shared an office with the son of the man who wrote The Joy of Sex, a bestselling early 1970s “gourmet guide to lovemaking”. He had a bushy beard to match the Yeti-like one famously sported by his father on the cover illustration. This was back in the 1990s, when beards were seen as a bit of a joke and moustaches tended to signify an unpalatable character in Mike Leigh and Alan Ayckbourn plays.
When won the way back in 1974, the average British bloke professed to be baffled at how the hairy men had managed to pair up with the gorgeous Agnetha and Anni-Frid. When became prime minister, in 1979, the beard was chased to the margins of politics too: she refused to promote any man with facial hair into ministerial office.
But a generation later, once footballers such as and took up the hipster look, millions of fashion-conscious young men were bound to follow suit and did. And now we have the Prince of Wales giving the long-term royal seal of approval to the beard, I am afraid we clean-shaven chaps are rather sunk.
William can be forgiven due to the fact that he has prematurely gone rather thin on top and therefore may feel that a luxuriant growth of facial hair stops him looking old beyond his years. I must grudgingly admit that in his case this is true, too.
Of course, he will have known that both Edward VII and George V were famous beard-wearers, so he also has tradition on his side. also went through a mercifully brief and largely forgotten bearded phase while a Royal Navy officer but has been fuzz-free ever since.
So what do we do next my fellow lifelong shavers? And don’t say nothing. Because if we follow that path then we will all end up as furry fellows. That’s the thing about facial hair. You can’t sit on the fence about it and just wait to see what happens. Unless you actively ward it off every day it will engulf you in the end.
Yet it feels wrong to surrender and leap into the fast-growing world of beard-care products. Father Christmas, himself a notorious beardie, will soon be delivering facial grooming gels and gizmos worth tens of millions of pounds in total to homes across the land. Perhaps the women in our lives would rejoice at having fresh ideas for presents for us.
But no. That way madness lies. I for one shall be holding out against the new status quo with all the determination exhibited by Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who remained in the jungle for several decades because he refused to accept the war was over.
My barber tells me that more than half his customers have beards. Whenever I pop in for a short-back-and-sides if I see that a bearded bloke is ahead of me in the queue I go straight back out again because I know how long it will take for his combined haircut and beard-trim.
The problem with that is these days there nearly always is at least one bearded man ahead of me in the queue. So my hair is in danger of growing rather long.
And you don’t want to get me started on that.