This is my greatly overdue response to the Blaugust ‘community builder’ “Low Stakes Hot Take” challenge.
I’m a man. Men generally grow more hair on their face than women. Sometimes they style or trim that facial hair in ways that please themselves or others.
Men who are not deeply interested in their appearance do not spend significant time every day making it *look* like they started growing a beard… and then stopped before it finished. Yet Hollywood wants us to believe that this ‘half-grown’ look is totally a thing that non-fussy men do. And that really frosts my cookies.
It’s a lie!
These ‘not quite’ beards are invariably attached to male characters that are supposed to be disinterested in their appearance. They are busy men working long hours to save the world, suffering overwhelming challenges to life and limb, with no time for the fripperies of personal appearance.
Zeke (Matt Long) from ManifestHouse (Hugh Laurie) from HouseBeardy McBeardface
It is perfectly reasonable to be clean-shaven then, due to one, two, or three days of neglecting your facial hair, to end up looking like these guys. Then you get a few spare minutes and quickly shave to start the process all over again.
But in Hollywood, somehow, these men look this way all the god-damned time. Day after day, episode after episode, scene after scene: characters with in-progress beards maintain that in-progress look perfectly.
I know for a fact that maintaining this kind of ‘half-grown’ look takes far more effort than shaving it all off or growing an actual beard. It requires shaping to prevent the hair from growing down the neck or up the cheeks (or on the ears!). It takes special shavers with spacers to trim the beard “just so”. To be clear, neatly maintaining an actual full beard can be a lot of work too… but bearded men aren’t pretending not to care about their facial hair.
Maintaining the appearance of a half-grown beard takes work and dedication to personal appearance that is almost always completely at odds to the character being portrayed. These are 24 hour a day workers, guys who live in the bush, recovering drug addicts… where do they get the time and interest in their appearance to maintain this?!
And heck, even the ‘no effort’ hair styles these guys generally have take way more time and effort than just a comb or brush! Doctor House and Zeke from Manifest are definitely using more product in their coiffure than I’ve ever owned in my life.
Of course its fake…
I know, I know- it’s Hollywood, so it is all fake. Every character in a Hollywood show is far more beautiful/handsome than humans have a right to be, and we watchers generally want it that way. But the perfect ‘not quite grown’ beard thing… for some reason, that is just a bridge too far for me.
Shave it or grow it: the ‘in between’ look is too high-maintenance for the characters it is usually attached to.
Your average too-busy-to-care-for-their-health protagonist rocking that 10/10 body, face, fashin style, hair, but they have a slightly jaded moral compass.
As someone who is too lazy to maintain a beard, that’s the exact motivation I need to shave it, not just have it stuck sparsely to my face!
I admit that I sometimes have too little motivation to shave for a few days: I usually ‘max out’ at about three days. My hair, like me in general, is very pale: it takes a lot of growth before my ‘beard’ becomes properly ‘beardy’. Around three days is when the stubble starts to become properly visible.
But at about the two or three day mark I usually say ‘enough of this’ and shave it off before I actually have to do any beard maintenance. If those 10/10 guys in the TV shows were portrayed as properly lazy like me, they’d appear ‘clean shaven’ about 30% of the time (at least). But their team of stylists and makeup artists get their precision trimmers out and maintain the perfect growth in defiance of any proper in-character logic.
Maybe I just don’t understand how actual Hollywood males work. Perhaps 10/10 guys have some kind of genetic oddity that causes their beard to stop growing at precisely the ‘half-beard’ stage? This requires some kind of scientific research or something…
Your average too-busy-to-care-for-their-health protagonist rocking that 10/10 body, face, fashin style, hair, but they have a slightly jaded moral compass.
As someone who is too lazy to maintain a beard, that’s the exact motivation I need to shave it, not just have it stuck sparsely to my face!
Exactly!
I admit that I sometimes have too little motivation to shave for a few days: I usually ‘max out’ at about three days. My hair, like me in general, is very pale: it takes a lot of growth before my ‘beard’ becomes properly ‘beardy’. Around three days is when the stubble starts to become properly visible.
But at about the two or three day mark I usually say ‘enough of this’ and shave it off before I actually have to do any beard maintenance. If those 10/10 guys in the TV shows were portrayed as properly lazy like me, they’d appear ‘clean shaven’ about 30% of the time (at least). But their team of stylists and makeup artists get their precision trimmers out and maintain the perfect growth in defiance of any proper in-character logic.
Maybe I just don’t understand how actual Hollywood males work. Perhaps 10/10 guys have some kind of genetic oddity that causes their beard to stop growing at precisely the ‘half-beard’ stage? This requires some kind of scientific research or something…