Girl Cooties

[Originally posted December 5, 2005]

I have a full beard. It’s going grey. It’s going grey in a pattern that looks, well… stupid. It’s grey on the sides, with a still-brown stripe partway down the middle, as if I’ve been drooling tobacco juice.

So Julie suggested I might color it, not so much to hide my age as to make it look less like I spilled gravy on it. By coincidence, I got a coupon for Just For Men hair color in the mail the other day, so today I went to the local pharmacy and looked in the hair-color aisle.

No Just For Men; no Grecian Formula; nothing aimed at the male consumer. Hundreds upon hundreds of brightly-colored boxes showing women with hair in assorted colors, including many never seen in nature; nothing for men.

After a moment’s thought, inspiration strikes — I ask a clerk where the shaving supplies are. She directs me two aisles over, and sure enough, amid the Mach3 Turbo razors and other machismo-drenched products, I find a decent selection of Just For Men.

The fact that it’s hair color is less important than the fact that it’s for manly men, who wouldn’t ever set foot in the girly-girly, cooties-infested hair color aisle.

Sigh. Humans are so silly.

[Original comment page is here.]

5 thoughts on “Girl Cooties

  1. Very late response, but better late than never.
    Hair color for beards is different than hair color for hair. I know because once I had my beard and hair bleached white for christmas (Ho,Ho,Ho) and the beard stuff is more powerful and more jelly-like ( is that a proper word?).

  2. I dunno, I’ve used both beard color and hair color, and they didn’t seem that different. I think it may vary more with brand than with where it’s going.

    Of course, beard hair is different from head hair, so it’d be perfectly reasonable if they were different, but they all seem pretty pastelike to me.

    Incidentally, the gray has spread a little further, and the spilled-gravy streak is far less distinct now, so I’ve stopped worrying about it. I still have a two-color beard, but it’s much more esthetically satisfying.

    Y’know, many years ago I sold my beard to Gillette for research. Seriously, they have a lab near here, and they advertised for bearded men who were willing to shave ’em off for fifty bucks, and I figured it was an easy fifty bucks, so I sold them mine. Didn’t like how I looked without it and grew it right back, but it was an educational experience, because the researcher who bought it explained to me that beards have two different kinds of hair in them, and one of those has two or three sub-types, as well, and all of them are different from hair elsewhere. That’s one reason the gray is so uneven — mustache hairs generally don’t go gray until well after the others, and it’s not just the upper lip that grows mustache hairs, but also just below the lower lip, and sometimes a few other spots.

    Weird, huh?

  3. That is weird, but you know, I have always noticed the the beard on the edge of my lower lip is always a different color, texture and growth rate from the rest of my beard.

  4. I’ve recently grown a full beard and mustache and am fairly happy with it. It’s mostly grey except for the mustache which is a brownish red(with several grey strands) on one side and grey like the rest of the beard on the other…I’ve bleached the darker side with ok results but still not happy with it.
    Also that side doesn’t grow as fast nor is it as full. Of course wifey says it’s hardly noticeable…any ideas?

  5. Two-color mustache? That’s unusual. Were you ever injured there, maybe? I know scar tissue can affect hair growth.

    My best suggestion is to just trim the faster-growing side more aggressively, to balance things out, and keep up the bleaching.

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