BEARDS! What’s not to love about ’em? I’m not talking about the smeared splatter of upper lip hair your boyfriend had when he was 17, I mean proper manly lumberjack face fur. I am 100% #TeamBeard (can we get this trending?) and would urge every manboy to grow one. I think they are a bit like marmite, with some people utterly detesting them. Well bad luck to those people as November = Movember and beards are pretty much on the menu. You can’t help but think beard equals hipster, and with brands like Hymn, ASOS and Urban Outfitters using heavily bearded men as fashion accessories; you can see why they’re not helping this hipster cliche. That aside, I think beards are great and as long as they’re maintained and not filled with bits of food (ew) more guys should go for the grow.

Beards really became ‘a thing’ for my age group when I was at uni, and as you can imagine Art School the corridors were littered with bearded boys. I guess this was around the time that guys could actually manage to grow a proper one rather than just some fluff. This surge of facial fuzz influenced me in my second year to steer one of my studio projects towards this new trend. The brief was vague and said we had to do a project on seven places in Britain, so I decided to focus on the facial hair of seven cities in the UK. Random I know, but I always strived to do something different with my work and more importantly; make it fun. My final piece was a hand drawn/made/stitched book all about my new hairy obsession. This involved various research carried out about beards, the simplest form being running around East London asking to take pictures of them! They must have thought I was a right creep. I did all the illustrations and art work myself and the beard on the front cover was stitched into the page. This has always been my favourite project I did at uni, and is still in my portfolio today!

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So you can see why I’m a happy bunny when Movember comes around every year. Beards are fun, and oh so mysterious. Like; what’s hiding in there..? (answer: a chin) So if you are a beard hater I urge you to change your mind, hopefully guys who are trying out a beard this month may take to it and keep it, after all it does have the ability to age the baby-faced and disguise the blemished. BuzzFeed reported on a new trend ‘Lumbersexual‘ and let’s face it, BuzzFeed never lies.