Bearding the Lion.

I have a new boyfriend! OK, not really, but after almost 8 months of hirsutitude, Steve finally shaved his beard off this weekend. It's like being with a whole new guy, a guy who draws double-takes from passers-by due to his remarkable resemblance to David Arquette but has more kissable cheeks and a more mischievous smile and better taste in women.

Sometimes I'm a little jealous of the whole guy/facial hair thing. A boy can alter his entire persona with nothing more than a week of razor abstinence, and can undo a misguided moustache moment (there are no other kinds of moustache moments) with a few flicks of the Bic. Not that I want to grow a goatee or anything, but my own aesthetic experiments seem to come with higher risks and more lasting consequences.

The first moment of seeing a freshly debearded man is deeply jarring. Whether the clean-shaven guy is my boyfriend, my brother, or my dad, my brain can't seem to process the baby-smooth face before me, and it flips frantically through my inner Rolodex searching for a match. But after a while (an hour, a day, maybe longer), the pink-cheeked face becomes reinstalled in the proper mnemonic location and I can't quite remember what the guy in question looked like hairy. If the man is a serial bearder like my father or Cocteau,* this facial-recognition process repeats itself time after time, always bringing shock with the first post-shave sighting.

Steve's recently removed beard began to sprout during our yurt trip at New Year's. By the end of January, it was thick and bushy and dramatically darker than his soft, smooth, golden-brown head hair. After some prompting (and by prompting, I mean whining) from me, he pruned it down to a more professional and less chin-tickling length, but it remained rebelliously black and unruly.

I rather like Steve's bearded look, which oozes the brooding, nonconformist sexiness of a mountain man. But I'm delighted to have his adorable face back for a while, because I missed his dimples and his chin and the intricacies of his smile.

Plus, he's totally cuter than David Arquette.
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* "There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard." Jean Cocteau.

Comments

[Rana]

Hee. I can _so_ empathize with this. D. can grow a beard at the drop of a hat, if and when he wants, which is fascinating and weird at the same time. And my brother and I both remember the trauma when our dad shaved off his mustache, which he'd had all our lives. (We were very glad when he eventually grew it back.)