My Experience Growing a Beard, And Then Shaving It
10 Dec 2022This year, I participated in No Shave November (we don’t talk about how the other \(N^{3}\) went for me.) Almost a week in December, I decided to shave it off. While I have no regrets about shaving it off, I do want to remember what it felt like (without having to wait almost a month.) Hence, this account.
As usual, all advice given here is to be taken with not a grain of salt but a molecule.
Preliminary Growth
I actually only realized I was not shaving in November a few days after when a decent stubble had already appeared. Photo below.
It looked okay, but was pretty itchy and overall pretty annoying. It didn’t form any kind of cohesive shape that was identifiable as a beard: put simply, it just looked like excess hair added on a clean-shaven face. It did get better, but the main thing during this step is to just not shave it nor obsess about it. Admit that it is NOT a beard, but will be soon.
For the most part and did feel discouraged by the slow growth. Luckily, I kept it on because only 4 days later, it was much more full.
Tip: Be patient. Why? Not all hair grows at the same rate.
Somebody write a differential equation to model beard growth.
While this kind of a beard with stray hairs and even a little bald spot in the middle of the chin doesn’t look great to say the least, it does feel great. With my clean shaven face right now, I still find myself rubbing my chin hoping to feel the prickly sensation akin to mild acupuncture.
Here’s a list of all the things you can do with a beard:
- Make Fun of Your Friends Who Can’t Grow One
- Convince yourself you look better with it
- Enjoy the feeling of constant poking on your face (good for winter)
- Feel older
When Beards Suck
Basically, at a certain point in a beard enjoyer’s growth, the beard grows out of control. Hairs start to grow in incongruent directions and some extend farther out from your face than others. In other words, a mess. Furthermore, for me at least, my beard was not closing in all the way.
The only good thing at this phase was the mustache. Lowkey wished I just kept the mustache and shaved everything off, but more on that later. Of course, the beard still have the same benefits, but its hideous appearance made it more of “oh, that is a beard” than “damn, that is a beard.”
The only benefit to this was being able to claim that I participated in my skit group project playing Obi-Wan Kenobi by growing a beard.
However, that’s where trimmers come in. They remove excess hair on the sides and make the beard feel like something that was styled instead of accidental. During NSN, I only really did one trim. And it looked pretty fire afterward:
Trimming is a lot of work compared to a clean shave, but it is worth it. By far, this was the peak of my beard growth. One of the things before I started growing my (former) beard was just the pure time commitment. It requires basically nothing except dedication and genes for it to grow to a point where it feels good, but for it to look good - much more than clean shaving. I only did one trim because trims take way too long.
Still, grow a beard. At least try to. Decide once the beard is there whether or not you want to trim.
The only thing with trimming though is to be careful. You could accidentally shave off your entire beard if you use a trimmer not right for your size.
The Post Trim Era
Post trim, I let the beard do its thing and continuing growing. It once again regressed back to its hideous, unclean shape. I guess you could say a prt of me enjoyed having that unclean hair on my face because of its ability to show to people that I was tired.
The photo above does a pretty good job at demonstrating the effect of the beard. If I was to smile today with my baby face, I would lack the inherent masculine and borderline aggressive vibes that my face used to give off. The effect of this all depends on those who view you, I guess.
Why I Shaved
It’s actually pretty simple. It was already a few days into December, and not only did my mom continously tell me every 5 seconds the beard looked bad, I also had a business pitch coming up in a few weeks.
It mostly changed though when I got this message from a fellow classmate:
Within a few days, I had decided to shave. The pressure was insurmountable and most of all, with November in the rearview mirror there was no real reason to keep it.
While the benefits of the beard are real, the main one is to relive the experience of being clean-shaven the first time.
I guess I knew about this the entire time. The main motivation ever-present in the back of my mind was to have the most satisfying clean shave possible.
Some shaving advice: don’t be like me
On December 4th, my mom was yelling at me shortly before going to bed about how she would get extremely mad and take my computer if I slept past 1:30am. So, to hopefully make her happy + suprise her, I decided to shave.
However, I was stupid and decided to procrastinate this to after all my work was done which was around 1:40am. Despite watching countless shaving beard videos, my brain decided that I would be able to shave without first using a trimmer and then the razor. When I realized this, I also realized another crucial detail: the trimmer was in another room and I didn’t want to wake her up either.
By the time this astounding insight fell upon me, I had already shaved in some areas of my face. Even worse, the hair was so thick that it essentially clogged up the razor and at times made it unusable. I had to manually remove the hair and continue going at it. It took almost three latherings of shaving cream for it to finally come off. The ensuing result was not pretty.
However, after the shaving was all done, it was arguably one of the best moments of my life. I couldn’t stop smiling and noticing how much cleaner I looked.
Conclusion: Try it
I am still extremely grateful that I did actually try and commit to No Shave November. It felt amazing to venture into unknown territory, that too through only natural growth. My only suggestion is to
at least try to a beard one for three weeks before making the lame excuse you can’t. Then shave it off and suprise everybody with how good you look.