I've reached a new state of beardly in the past few months. I start clean shaven. This lasts about a day. I go a week or so in the Rudy Fernandez mold, removing nothing but neck hair. Simple enough. Neck hair never looks good, and it only takes a second to whack. Then I start trimming up around the cheeks. Nothing too precise. Just a quick whisk. About 14 days into it, I shave off the sides and have a goatee. Sometimes I'll leave lamb chops if I feel adventurous. About four days later, I can stick out my tongue and feel whisker. That annoys me. I'll shave that fucker down to a gay porn stache. (The one flaw in may facial hair is that no matter how I prune it, my mustache looks homosexual. If I do handlebars, I look like a "top". If I keep it thin, I'm a bottom.) Usually I keep it for about a half hour for my wife to laugh. Nobody else may see it. Then I shave the little rascal off and I'm back to clean-shaven. I really like the new dynamic. Every morning I wake up and have to grab my face to see where I'm at today. One added benefit I hadn't planned on is that I spend about a fourth as much time doing facial hair maintenance as I did back when I shaved or kept a trimmed beard/goatee. The clear-cutting approach (as I call it) has no downside and only upside.
I get noon-oclock shadow, but alas I haven't had a full beard since I got married 7 years ago -- a definite turnoff for the wifey. But back in the day in my mid twenties I had a pretty good Grizzly Adams thing going on, especially in the winter and spring when it was peak mountaineering season.
Every man should grow a beard at least once. There are some people out there that should not have beards though. People with neck beards should be shot.
I can't grow one. I just turned 30 and now I have to shave every other day. Nothing but stuble around my lip and chin though. I don't grow anything on my cheeks.
