Beards Are Sexy Againor Did It Pass When Captain Shaved His Off
MUMBAI: Istayak Ansari, manager of Lloyds Luxuries, which runs Truefitt & Hill, a concatenation of premium men'due south salons in India, admits that when they noticed more men sporting beards some years back they idea it was a passing trend: "Nosotros thought it would be around for a year or then." But so they noticed that the facial fuzz wasn't fading abroad.
It isn't merely that more men are wearing beards, but more young men are sporting them — and taking pride in styling their beards in different ways. Beards are cropping up on menswear runways and in fashion shoots.
Even business organisation is becoming beard-friendly. "A lot of guys in our sales teams and at the caput role have the trendy bristles and we are admittedly fine with it. Style is a personal choice and we respect that," says Kavindra Mishra, managing director, India, Pepe Jeans London.
Bollywood is likewise going bearded. This is partly due to menses pictures which require the stars to keep beards. But many younger stars like Shahid Kapoor and Ranveer Singh seem to like their disguised looks — a sharp contrast with older stars like Salman Khan, who has almost never been seen in a bristles, and Shah Rukh Khan, who merely wears one reluctantly. But Aamir Khan has happily gone hirsute, emphasising over again his difference from the other 2 Khans.
Cricket has always been more beard-friendly than some other sports.
The legendary 19th century cricketer WG Grace had a especially luxurious one. Just Indian cricketers tended to avert beards, mayhap equally a contrast to Pakistani cricketers.
Virat Kohli'due south squad has abruptly inverse this, with many emulating their sharply bearded captain. Kohli's importance equally a style icon must have hugely helped popularise beards with young men.
Kohli tends to continue a sharply cutting beard, which requires regular styling. And it was when young men like him started visiting Truefitt & Loma regularly for styling that the salons realised that far from being a trouble to an institution that prided itself on its luxurious shaves, beards had real benefits.
"Beards can have loftier maintenance costs especially if you lot desire to keep them in a item style," says Ansari.
Facial hair has arguably greater impact on how someone looks than scalp hair, which means appearance conscious men volition be going to the barber far more ofttimes than just for a haircut. Abhinav Gandhi, style director at Toni & Guy Salons, N Republic of india, makes the betoken that while all salons can practice basic beard work, "beard styling is a thing for the barber shops which requires, trimming, razoring, threading and cutting hair 1-past-one."
Jaykishan Anant Pawar, senior stylist at Truefitt & Loma explains that beards need planning. "Men have to let them abound for a week or two and so discuss with the stylist what shape would suit their beard and face the best." Beards also demand maintenance which is why they at present sell beard oils and balms. "Beards come up into much closer contact with your pare and if you aren't conscientious, the products yous utilize tin cause peel irritation," Pawar explains.
This is also why he recommends that beard wearers shampoo their beards at night. The popularity of beard-specific products can be seen in the 45% stake that Marico recently took in Beardo, an Ahmedabad-based startup that makes and sells them.
Some pognophiles — the fancy term for beard lovers — are even going across salves and salons in their search for perfection. Dr Sapna V Roshni, corrective surgeon and skin expert at Cocoona Center for Aesthetic Transformation, says men are increasingly asking for laser therapy to trim their beards.
"What surprises me is that these are common men in regular jobs non related to modelling or mode in anyway. They want their beard styled in sure ways. It could exist for fashion and manner or could simply be convenience as laser therapy reduces pilus growth and they can relieve time on shaving." She says at that place has been a 20-30% increment in the need for beard laser therapy as compared to last year.
21ST CENTURY FAD
The current trend for beards, specially with younger men is linked to their increasing popularity in the Due west after a relatively long period out of favour.
"In the twenty-first century, facial hair has attained greater social presence than in the previous century," writes Christopher Oldstone-Moore in "Of Beards and Men", his fascinating new history of facial fashion.
He notes forecasts from Procter & Gamble almost falling sales for razors and about how style icons like David Beckham now accept almost constant stubble (which is quite hard to maintain at precisely that level).
Films and television also worked against beards by privileging the open up, manifestly more than trustworthy look of the shaved face. I notorious moment was the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, ane of the kickoff really widely watched political fights, and i which Nixon was widely thought to have lost because the faint shadow of his stubble fabricated him announced untrustworthy.
It is still quite rare for leading politicians in the Due west to have a bristles, or fifty-fifty a moustache.
Rather more persuasively, Oldstone-Moore suggests that the 19th century beard fashion was linked to the rapid changes being wrought by industrialisation and urbanisation. This inverse the role of men, from the actual physical labour of centuries, to more sedentary, intellectual work (women, of course, still had considerable physical labour with housework). But this made men fear they might exist losing their masculine authority, so growing a beard came to be seen every bit a uniquely male person way of recapturing and projecting information technology. Victorian men like Darwin and Marx all had flowing beards.
The cyclical nature of trends and then tin can explain the 20th century disfavor to beards, and the 21st century reversion to them. But Oldstone-Moore's explanation suggests another reason for the current fad. Simply as 19th century men faced a sense of emasculation due to technological change, 21st century men might be feeling the aforementioned equally they deal with the force of the digital revolution and a reordering of society that is even more profound since this fourth dimension, to some extent at least women aren't entirely excluded.
This explains the hipster passion for beards, forth with its accent on self-consciously concrete piece of work (beer brewing, coffee roasting, carpentry), of the kind that would have been classified every bit masculine in the past.
Another influence too has its roots in emphasising beards every bit a unique sign of masculinity – the gay rights movement with its hair-loving sub-cultures of Bears and Leathermen.
Oldstone-Moore notes how these looks have fabricated their way into the mainstream through constructs like the metrosexual, whose conscientious care of his looks neatly extends to sharply styled beards.
INDIA: A FERTILE GROUND
If these are the influences behind the current beard trends, it should be noted that India was always likely to provide fertile ground. Bharat didn't escape the Due west'southward embrace of the razor, but nosotros were never as rigid virtually it.
1 reason was the accommodation we accept always had to make for religious beards for Sikhs, Muslims or Hindus (for particular rituals) – the increasingly diverse West is only dealing with this now. There is also the influence of ancient images of disguised sages and warriors, reinforced through mythological and historical films, serials and comics.
Beards are besides associated with the prototype of the common human being, which might be why and then many politicians wear them.
Chandra Sekhar, our beginning bearded prime number minister, drew heavily on this image and if our subsequent bearded PMs (Inder Gujral and Manmohan Singh) didn't quite accept them for the same reason, our current PM seems to combine some aspect of that appeal with perhaps an invocation of sage-like wisdom. Narendra Modi still stands out at gatherings of international leaders for existence i of the few with a beard.
Oldstone-Moore is probably right to be cautious about how long this current beard trend volition last.
There are powerful forces against it, as was demonstrated recently when an Arab-American friend arrived hither with his beard shaved off. "I only didn't feel this was the correct fourth dimension to exist travelling with a name like mine and a beard," he said. Information technology is like shooting fish in a barrel to see the rise of razors once again, for reasons ranging from the uncomfortably political to just the inevitable backlash against hipsters.
Simply fifty-fifty passing trends expand what is acceptable, and we're readier at present to confront a fuzzier future.
(With inputs from Shambhavi Anand)
Source: https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/from-virat-kohli-to-ranveer-singh-sporting-a-beard-is-now-more-fashionable-than-ever/articleshow/57951592.cms
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