Scrubbed, shaved, plucked, and waxed

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

It's not often that the Fashion section of the NYTimes notices anything remotely connected to my personal appearance. Rarer still--rarer by far--that it it identifies something about me as the "next big thing" in fashion. In fact, about the only thing more unlikely than that is when the Times' Fashion section declares that I have, in fact, been ahead of the style curve for over 25 years.

But that is indeed the situation we face--I choose the verb with some care--at the moment.

Trend spotters, style mavens, fashion forecasters, and focus-groupies have identified the full beard--the Times goes so far as to use descriptors like "bushy" and even "scraggly"--as the next hot look for men.

"This is some sort of reaction to men who look scrubbed, shaved, plucked and waxed," said the designer Bryan Bradley, who stepped onto the runway after his Tuleh presentation looking like a renegade from the John Bartlett show, at which more than half the models wore beards: untidy ones that scaled a spectrum from wiry to ratty to shabby to fully bushy.

"It's less 'little boy,' " Mr. Bradley said. "For a while men have looked too much like Boy Scouts going off to day camp."

Scrubbed, shaved, plucked and waxed--four adjectives that emcees have never had to dip into their thesauri for as they called me up to the podium. I have the same beard I started a couple of decades before "metrosexual" was named the 2003 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. It was pretty cheesy then, and the only reason I'm willing to call it "scraggly" now is because the Times apparently would, too.

I've had several opportunities--and many more invitations--to shave it off, but at this point I'm one of the few people left who know what I look like without it. Believe me, America--we're all better off this way.

The Times article mentions Ulysses S. Grant's beard as the sort of thing with-it men are shooting for now. It also offers up a photo of George Clooney with a full beard--grey-streaked and well trimmed, in "Syriana"--as the exemplar of the new look. Exactly the comparison I was going for.

(Postscript: The story has apparently become quite the hot topic at Free Republic, which makes me wonder if maybe I need to rethink this whole thing after all.)