25 Problems Only Men With Beards Will Understand

Or women with beards, but they probably have more problems all together...

By Simon Gallagher /

Having a beard is a wonderful thing: being able to grow a sweet beard with a shiny and the thickness of a small forest should be a mark of true achievement. Back before someone who probably couldn't grow a beard decided that shaving off your naturally occuring animal mane was more hygienic and more fashionable (both utter garbage, by the way), men had beards and long hair and everything was simpler. You didn't see them complaining about the poor battery life of their iPhones, or about the traffic, did you? There's definitely a link. A beard is just as much of a calling as your career choice, and taking the plunge to add a permanent heating solution to your lips and chin will enrich your life in a significant number of ways. You will instantly become part of the bearded brethren - an unspoken community that shares appreciative nods - and you get the added bonus of being called a Bear. This means different things to different people, but all implications should be viewed as good. Unfortunately, beards aren't all plain sailing, and anyone planning to take the plunge, or commit long-term to their own face growth should run down this list of pains, gripes and grumbles that only the bearded folk of the world will ever understand...

25. Having To Say You're Not A F*cking Hipster

"Oh, beards are so popular now, aren't they." It might come as a shock to some, but the humble beard was not invented in 2012 by an artisan coffee and tweed shoe maker who only listens to vinyl (but no bands that YOU would have heard of, obviously). The problem is though, that bloody hipsters took the beard and ran with it, and now everyone who grew their own beard before the Age Of Hip kicked off has to explain that they aren't a d*ckhead.

24. That Weird Phantom Milk Smell

For some reason, often with no explanation or obvious cause, the Beard Smell Fairy will impregnante your face furniture with a smell like off milk. And somehow, no amount of cleaning will get rid of it.

20. The Vice-Like Grip Of Babies

You know when babies squeeze your finger, and their hands are tiny and their grip all fierce and lovely? It's cute isn't it? Well, it's not when we pick your child up and naturally bring them close to our faces to talk nonsense to them like the cooing morons we all become when babies are around, and they do the same reflex on our beards. Getting a child to relinquish their tiny vice-like grip is a lot like trying to get a bulldog to stop biting down; it's impossible without somebody getting very upset.