Back in January of 2006, I decided that I wanted to try out some facial hair. I’ve always tried to stay clean-shaven, but I decided that I wanted to try something different.



Over the long Martin Luther King weekend, I let my beard and mustache grow. On Tuesday morning, I chickened out and shaved everything off. It hadn’t gotten very long at that point, but I still didn’t feel like going to work like that.



Later in January, I took a week off to go skiing in Colorado. The skiing was great fun, and this gave me a whole 9 or 10 days to let the hair grow before I had to go back to work. So, I got off work on a Friday, and by the Monday a week later, it had grown a fair amount. I felt like it was to a point where I could actually go out in public and have it show up as being something worthwhile.



By the end of March, when this picture was taken, my beard/mustache had reached the point where I was regularly trimming it. I had gone out and bought a trimmer which had adjustable parts to where I could choose how long I wanted the hair to remain. Nothing fancy, but it was working ok for me.

I continued on this path all through April, May, June, and most of July. About the only change occurred in late June. I had been trimming the area right below my mouth. In late June I started to just let that hair grow.

In July, I started thinking that maybe I should change something. Let it grow differently, trim it differently. Lose the beard, or lose the mustache. Or, maybe… just maybe.. lose both.



So, here I am. It’s a Friday night. I’m not ready to run to the library yet. I’ve got time to kill. I had been thinking that if I was going to cut off the hair, I would do it on a Friday night. Then, if I have an inverse five o’clock shadow (too much shade due to the hair) I would have the weekend for it to normalize out before going to work on Monday.

So, I go into the bathroom. Get the trimmers out. Put a trashcan in the sink to catch the hair. And decided that, if I were going to do it, I might as well record it for all time and let the world see the process. So, I went and grabbed the camera and set it up.



I removed the trimmer attachment that set the exact depth of cut so that the trimmer could just remove all the hair it could find. And then I started in. I started underneath the chin. Zoom zoom. The trimmer did a fine job. A ton of quarter inch long hairs went slowly floating down into the trash can. A trim trim here, and a trim trim there, and I was wondering if it was really wise for me to be undoing all that work.



Needless to say, at this point, it was too late to stop. I would have looked like I had gotten into a losing battle with a weed whacker if I had stopped at that point. So, I kept trimming. The trimmers did a pretty good job of getting most of the hair. They definitely got it trimmed down to where the hair was about a millimeter long. Some might say I was still shell shocked at this point. I say I was just showing off for the camera. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

At that point, it was all over except for the finish work. I got out my normal razor and started cleaning up the small pieces.


A few minutes later, and my face looked a whole lot different than it had before. Am I sorry? Nah.. It was time for a change. Will I stay clean shaven? Who knows. I’ll stay this way for a while. If I decide I want to go back to the land of the bushy haired, I can always do that. The process doesn’t really take all that long. About a month to grow it, and about 7 minutes to get rid of it. No problem.

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