Saturday, Nov 24, 2007

What's with the beak?" asked the young woman, making a wisecrack about the fuzz under my lower lip, which is my latest attempt at looking cool.

I had met this former colleague of mine at a busy shop last week. She had always seen me clean shaved at our workplace and now she looked closely at my lower lip for a long while, which was quite disconcerting, and used the word chonch in Hindi, for beak, which sounded even more cheeky.

I quickly mumbled something lame in my reply, because I didn't expect that kind of a response to my facial hair. In contrast, the adverts usually show a middle aged man sprouting grey hair from his cheeks, and damsels with almond eyes practically swooning all around him.

I chose this type of fuzz because a cheek full of hair at my age would make me look like Yasser Arafat. The PLO leader was a stylish man and always sprouted day-old grey stubble. The first time I saw him at Jeddah airport in Saudi Arabia, he had by then discarded his dark glasses and his revolver, but looking at his face, I thought he had had a tough night of negotiations and had never slept. Over the years he somehow managed to look like he didn't get time to shave that day; the day-old stubble remained his trademark throughout his life.

Arafat look

The Arafat look is back now and everyone from shoe designers to IT geeks who drop in at Dubai, are sprouting these minimal beards. The hairy face trend has got razor manufacturers worried and they are now advertising shaving blades for getting rid of body hair instead. Their adverts now show a kiwifruit with its hairy stubble, and desperate catch words floating around like "smooth" and "silky".

Beards have had a long and troubled history. Kings such as Peter I of Russia and Henry VIII enjoyed taxing hirsute people in their realms. In Greece, beards signified wisdom and knowledge, till Alexander, the guy who cut the Gordian Knot, came along and ordered everyone to shave.

His fear was that the enemy would find his soldiers' beards something handy to hang on while bashing them on the head. While the gentry at that time were smooth-cheeked, slaves were ordered to grow day-old stubbles. In Turkey, Ataturk, the founder of the nation, came along after the fall of the Caliphate and ordered everyone to shave. There's something about beards which gets everybody's goat, so to speak.

In Rome, teenagers were not allowed to shave till they reached adulthood, and the hair was offered to the deities.

When I was once growing a moustache, I went to Iraq to cover a conference. This was just a few weeks before Saddam Hussain walked into Kuwait. I was surprised to see El Presidento himself walking up to us to escort us safely into the media bus. As I stepped into the bus, I saw that Saddam was the bus driver.

I knew Saddam had a double, but this was ridiculous - everyone walking on the street of Baghdad sprouted a Saddam moustache. I was the only guy with a Sundance moustache in a sea of Saddams.

Coming back to beards, archeologists have found evidence of flints used as razors dating back to 30,000 BC. Shaving at that time must have been as excruciating as getting a bikini wax.

Soul Patch

Beards came in various forms. There is the goatee, a chin strip, chin curtain, mutton chops, Vandyke. The fuzz under my lower lip is for some reason known as Soul Patch. It is also known as Imperial or Mouche, which is "fly" in French.

A website on beards advises those who wish to grow facial hair not to let itching deter them in growing a beard. "Use a mild shampoo," it advises, "the same one you use on your hair". The irony is that the picture accompanying this advice is of a bald man.

Gulf News 2007. All rights reserved.