Don’t blink or you might miss my 15 seconds of being hip and cool, but the Grey Lady’s fashion section informs us that the hottest look today is a full beard:

A bearded Ralph Lauren model. I look just like him, but more handsome, and with brown skin and a turban.

At hipster hangouts and within fashion circles, the bearded revolution that began with raffishly trimmed whiskers a year or more ago has evolved into full-fledged Benjamin Harrisons. At New York Fashion Week last month at least a half-dozen designers turned up with furry faces… [at] the John Bartlett show… more than half the models wore beards: untidy ones that scaled a spectrum from wiry to ratty to shabby to fully bushy. [Link]

Wow. For the last three decades, Americans have seen the beard as anathema. The very word means a person who diverts suspicion from someone in both the contexts of betting and sexual orientation. To grow a beard is seen as dishonest, or at the very least, career suicide:

… [A] study in Australia showed that 92% of women and 79% of men would rather not work with people who have facial hair. It also found that senior managers think beards make men look shifty, unattractive and too old. [Link]

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p>Remember Al Gore? He grew a beard to signal the fact that he was a private person who had left public life, and he shaved it to signify that he was once again a political actor. Unlike in India, the American public doesn’t trust a bearded politician:

The last president to sport a mustache was William Taft, who served from 1909 to 1913, while the last bearded president, Benjamin Harrison, left office in 1893. [Link]

We have female senators and black senators, but we do not have a bearded senator… I believe that we will have a female president and a black president before we have another bearded president. [Link]

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p>However, hope is on the horizon. For a brief spell, there is a backlash against metrosexual facial conformity and 13 bladed razors. Men who work at lad magazines are growing beards – 11 of the 15 men working at Vice have them – and across NYC whiskers are sprouting where there were none before:

On city streets, too, trends in scruff have reached new levels of unruliness, a backlash, some beard enthusiasts say, against the heightened grooming expectations that were unleashed with the rise of metrosexuality as a cultural trend. Men both straight and gay, it appears, want to feel rough and manly. [Link]

There’s even a bearded rapper! How far will this go? Is it just a soul patch of a trend, or will this go all the way to the ZZ top?

John Allan, the owner of several clublike grooming salons in New York, reports seeing newly bearded customers, but not enough to warrant concerns for the health of his shaving business. “It will be interesting to see over the next six to eight months what mainland America is going to do with it,” Mr. Allan said. “For the past several years we’ve been stripping guys of their body hair. Maybe now it’s time for the pendulum to swing the other way…” [Link]

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p>The beard has even made a cameo in Hollywood: George Clooney, Mel Gibson, Heath Ledger, Ewan McGregor, and others have all appeared bearded, on screen and off, at least for a brief period of time.

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p>While there are clear limits to this development:

No survey ever conducted about women’s attitudes toward beards, even those not underwritten by the Gillette Company, has indicated that more than 2 or 3 percent of women would describe a full beard as sexy. [Link]

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p>It seems that Sikh models (and Waris) should claim the limelight while they can. As for me, I’ll be sitting here in the bunker, contemplating listing myself in the National Beard Registry, and waiting to be uncool once more,

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Updates:

Did you know that historically, beards were associated with sex?

In the 15th century, the beard was worn long. Clergymen in 16th century England were usually clean shaven to indicate their celibacy. When a priest became convinced of the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation he would often signal this by allowing his beard to grow, showing that he rejected the tradition of the church and perhaps also its stance on clerical celibacy. The longer the beard, the more striking the statement. Sixteenth century beards were therefore suffered to grow to an amazing length, (see the portraits of Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Cranmer). [Link]