A Lighter View
Fascination with facial hair
By K.E.H. Stagg

June 10, 2010

Facial hair is a distinguishing feature we can’t help noticing about other people. It’s one of those things we zero in on in pictures and immediately helps us date the era in which the photo was taken: Sideburns reaching to the chin? 1970s. No facial hair at all? 1950s. But that’s men’s moustaches and beards. While every Dillsburg resident has facial hair, on most females it’s nearly invisible, and on all of us, we try to keep it short enough not to need hedge trimmers.

I’ve sat through more business meetings trying—in vain, I must admit—to ignore the tufts of hair growing out of the canals in some poor man’s ears. It was so thick, I wondered if he were trying to hide hearing aids, but decided there was no room in all that fur for anything else. It’s a wonder his wife didn’t hand him a personal groomer and demand, “Get rid of the pelt in your ears.”

I also fall prey to a morbid fascination with hairy nostrils. I want to avert my gaze, just in case a boogie is trapped within sight, but then I can’t tear my eyes away from the incredible view of all that hair. In somebody’s nose, no less! Does it get hot in the summer? Does it thin out like a dog’s coat after winter?

We’ve all seen men with bushy unibrows. They’re far more distracting on females, I assure you! What’s almost as bad, however, is the woman I know who had either accidentally plucked hers into oblivion or shaved them off, but then drew them back in a blue-black shade with a very heavy hand. Why anyone would voluntarily put such a thing on her face is a mystery to me. I mean, if she had them originally, now was the perfect time to give herself more moderate brows, not faithfully recreate the caterpillars crawling across her eyes! And a natural shade, sans blue, might have helped, too.

One dark-headed woman I knew had a forest of black hair growing up her neck. She faithfully plucked all the hairs on her face, but what difference did it make when she had a neck beard? She wasn’t even 30 then, so I can only imagine how much denser the forest is now, 2 decades later!

In the interests of full disclosure, I have one black hair that grows right out of the middle of my forehead. It’s nowhere near my eyebrows, so I don’t have to worry about eventually having to wax a unibrow, but it’s not close to my hairline either. And the weird thing about it is that it’s blonde, right up until it gets long enough to see, at which point it suddenly turns black. Naturally, I pluck it the moment I spot it, but I wonder how it started growing there and what makes it change color.

Worse, I worry that someday I may no longer notice it’s growing, or I’ll get a whole bunch of them and will turn into my great-aunt, whom I mortified at a young age by inquiring very loudly, “How did you grow that moustache?” How was I supposed to know that she was hoping no one would notice and everyone but me pretended not to see? I thought it was a miracle, for crying out loud! Her moustache was longer and darker than many men I knew. Looking back, I wonder why she didn’t use bleach. Or just shave?

While I can’t help spotting, from about a thousand yards away, the excess facial hair on my fellow Dillsburgians, I can only hope I’m not sporting any. I carry a Swiss Army knife that has tweezers just in case.