james o'brien

At the risk of this blog turning into a “Beard Blog”, here’s my one month update on my attempt to grow a beard.

After roughly one month of letting it “grow wild” I went to the barber today to get a trim both “on top” and “down below”. On top, I’m a 1.5 clipper man myself. Down below, I asked the barber if he could just “tidy it up and even it up a bit”.

I’d read a fair bit about how you should let your beard “grow wild” for the first three or four weeks until it starts to fill in, and then go to a barber to get it shaped properly. If you have a patchy beard to start with (like most men do, apparently), your own attempts to trim and shape are more than likely going to make it look even more patchy.

So I’ve held off on purchasing a pair of clippers, and have decided for the first couple of months, I’d leave it to someone who knows what he or she is doing.

The thing which prompted me to go today was the really uncomfortable feeling of whiskers on the lips. I always thought the problem of itchiness would be greater, but it’s been nothing compared to the scratchiness of stray whiskers touching your lips. That, combined with little bits of left-over food attaching itself to the whiskers which touched my lips.

So, having had a trim today, and having snapped a photograph, I don’t think it looks too bad after all. It’s still fairly light on the sides. My ginger heritage is coming back to the fore, and oh, oh, those greys.

The general consensus of people who’ve commented on my beard has been positive. “It really suits you” is the most common phrase I’ve heard.

The one thing I have noticed is I’ve become slightly obsessed with male facial hair now. I swear I’m not about to become a “big old bear”, you won’t be seeing me with a big tummy dressed in leather chaps with my bum hanging out on the way to Mardi Gras, but I have been checking out beards a fair lot. It’s like when I first got a pair of glasses, it was like everyone in the world was wearing glasses. Now it seems the same with beards.

I promise my next blog post will not be about growing a beard.