Sathnam Sanghera: A Close Shave

A Close Shave

I was recently reading a copy of this newspaper in a coffee shop when I came across a picture so striking that it nearly had me choking to death on a latte. In short, not to beat around the (hairy) bush unnecessarily, to (razor) cut to the chase, it was a photograph of Fernando Rodes, the new chief executive of the French marketing services group Havas, sporting the most dramatic beard I have seen this side of Richard Harris’s rendition of Professor Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

There have, of course, always been a handful of successful businessmen with beards – Sir Richard Branson and Larry Ellison spring to mind – and there was, of course, a period in the 1970s when walking into any boardroom was like landing on the set of Planet of the Apes. But in recent decades the beard has become taboo, with a 2001 survey of British company directors finding that only 4 per cent believe bristles to be an advantage. So the Rodes portrait raised a titillating possibility: the renewed acceptance of face fuzz in the corporate arena.

To find out whether attitudes have changed, I recently decided to stop shaving. And while I waited for my five o’clock shadow to grow into something more substantial, I did some research. The first shock discovery was the extraordinary seriousness with which some beardies take their facial hair. The existence of beard websites, beard clubs, National Beard Week, beard parties, the World Beard and Moustache Association, the biannual World Beard and Moustache Championships and the Beard Liberation Front, “dedicated to the removal of a societal prejudice against the facially folically enhanced or bearded”, took me aback. Evidently, to quote a passionate beardie, there are those who believe that a beard is for life, not just for Father Christmas.

But as I read further, I began to understand why the bewhiskered feel the need to assert themselves: beards get a really bad press. In just five articles on the subject I came across a range of wild allegations, including the suggestion that men only grow beards to conceal something (a weak jawline, an extra chin or three and so on), that beards make men look undependable, that beards make men look untrustworthy (“never trust a man with a beard”) and that no sane woman has ever found a man with a beard attractive (one female journalist compared kissing a whiskered man to “snogging a Brillo pad”).

Unfortunately, business is just as pogonophobic as the media. There have been countless high-profile face-offs between employers and the hirsute, ranging from Waitrose, an upmarket UK supermarket chain, refusing to employ beardies in certain jobs to broadcasters asking certain on-screen staff to remove facial hair, to Butlins holiday camps insisting on fluff-free faces.

Invariably, the reasoning used to justify such discrimination is about as convincing as an adolescent moustache. It is often claimed facial hair is “unhygienic”. But, if so, surely food workers should be required to shave eyebrows and sideboards, too? Then there is the common accusation that the general public finds beards unappealing. But if you look closely at the surveys that back up the assertion – one recently suggested that only 5 per cent of women like to be kissed by a man with facial hair – you will find that many have been commissioned by razorblade companies. Hardly neutral observers.

Indeed, by the time my beard began to fill out, I felt quite sorry for the hirsute and was looking forward to listing the many ways in which beards are marvellous. Unfortunately, after 10 days of growth, I still had not been able to think of any. In spite of the good will, I hated my beard for the way it made me look like a jowly, Asian version of Friedrich Nietzsche, for the way food tended to hang in it and for the way it provoked endless unsolicited feedback from colleagues, which included comments such as:

“It doesn’t highlight your best features” (the implication being that my face is one of my weakest features); and “In general I think beards look best on people with thin faces” (the implication being that I have a fat face).

The only person who enjoyed it was my mother, who interpreted it as a sign that I had finally rediscovered my Sikh religion and would soon succumb to her pleas to get married to a simple village girl from the Punjab.

Of all the drawbacks, the uninvited feedback was the worst. Although men are said to be judged less on their appearance than women in business, it seems paradoxically that, because they have less to play with, if men do change anything they attract more comment than women. Beardies sometimes claim that, during the average lifetime, they will save more than 3,000 hours of life by not shaving every morning. The problem is that all the time saved is subsequently spent responding to comments about your beard. Taking a blade to your throat every morning is surely preferable.

Which is not to say I cannot see that beards do sometimes add value. They can make some people look ferocious (Rasputin), mysterious (Che Guevara), radical (Fidel Castro) and deep (God). Unfortunately, these values are not particularly prized by corporations and most of us just look messy in beards.

Moreover, despite the talk of diversity, companies are incredibly undiverse in practice. Most want their employees to conform, see things in a certain way and to look a certain way, too. As far as facial hair goes, this means a clean shave is nearly always the best a man can get. And while I am not one for making (shaving) rash predictions, I reckon that, within a year, either Mr Rodes or his dramatic beard will have gone.