Reflections of a bearded one
20/01/16 05:06
I first grew a beard when I was 17 years old. It was a bit thin and scraggly, but I was a freshman in college and it was the early 1970’s and I wanted to distinguish myself from my childhood. I guess I thought that the beard made me look older - more mature. Looking at pictures from those days now, I think it actually made me look a little silly. Beards, however, were very popular among the students with whom I associated: the theater majors, the music majors, and the theology and philosophy students. I am sure that our small campus ministry group had a majority of males with beards.
I didn’t shave my beard all the way off during the first three years of college. Then, during the summer between my junior and senior years of college I got married (with a beard) and shaved off my beard a couple of days after our wedding in order to take a job at a bakery. I kept the beard off for the summer and worked at the bakery. In the fall, when I returned to classes I grew my beard back out. I was twenty years old. I haven’t been clean shaven since.
Our children and grandchildren have never seen me without a beard. None of the congregations I have served in my career as a pastor has seen me without a beard.
The beard has garnered a lot of different reactions over the years. My wife’s grandmother Amy, who never saw me without the beard, used to make a face and say, “I’m not kissing those whiskers.” She kissed me on my forehead instead. After we had been married for a decade I received a report of a conversation that took place in her church. It seems that there was a candidate to become their minister and a group of the women of the church were discussing the candidate. One of the women in the group made a comment about the candidate’s beard. Amy flew to his defense, saying, “My grandson has a beard and he’s a very good minister.” She took to calling me her grandson in her later years, once even introducing my wife and I as “my grandson and his wife,” much to my wife’s dismay.
She kept kissing me on my forehead, however.
I’ve been known to comment that I might shave off the beard, except that as it is I can look in the mirror and see my face and if I think I’m a bit ugly, I can always consider shaving off the beard. If I were to shave the beard off and look in the mirror and discover that I was ugly, there would be no quick solution to the problem.
As a person who has worn a beard for all these years, my skin is a bit tender. I trim the edges of my beard with a razor and if I get a bit aggressive, my skin is pretty sore. Trimming my beard for length is a simple job with electric clippers. From time to time I have a hair stylist trim everything up to keep it straight and neat. My beard grows at about twice the rate of the hair on the top of my head, which is getting pretty thin. I have to trim it every couple of weeks.
In defense of the the practice of wearing a beard, a recent study, published in the Journal of Hospital Infection might be of interest. In the study the faces of 408 hospital staff with and without facial hair were swabbed and tested for infectious substances on their faces. Hospitals have good reasons to see how infections are spread. After all hospital-acquired infections are a major cause of disease and death in hospitals. Previous studies have focused on hands, white coats, ties, and equipment. It makes sense that the hospital might suspect beards as places that might harbor infectious substances.
The researchers, however, were surprised at their results. It was the clean-shaven staff who were more likely to be carrying something unpleasant on their faces. The beardless group were more than three times as likely to be harboring methicillin-resistant staph aureus on their freshly-shaven cheeks. MRSA is very common, but also very troublesome, as a source of hospital-acquired infections.
The researchers have offered several theories about why men with beards are significantly less likely to carry dangerous infections. One theory is that the micro-abrasions in the skin which are caused by shaving may support bacterial colonization and proliferation.
Dr. Adam Roberts, a microbiologist based at University College in London has another theory. He has been harvesting and colonizing bacteria found in beards. He has managed to identify over 100 different types of microbes from beards. Among the microbes are fungi that kill other bacteria. The substance, identified as part of a species called Staphylococcus epidermis, is especially effective at killing a form of E. coli that causes urinary tract infections. It is possible that there are microbes commonly found in beards that are effective at combatting MRSA.
Purifying and properly testing new antibiotics is so expensive and comes with such a high failure rate that it is unlikely that researchers will be harvesting beard microbes in the search for new antibiotics any time soon. There have been no new antibiotics produced in the past 30 years. The need for new antibiotics, however, is increasing. Antibiotic-resistant infections kill at least 700,000 people per hear and it is projected that by 2050 such infections will kill 10 million per year. The need for new antibiotics is evident.
Opinions about beards remain mixed. Alexander the Great banned his soldiers from growing beards, for fear that enemies would hold on to them in battle. The tradition of soldiers being clean shaven has persisted ever since. In Afghanistan, beards have been both compulsory and banned in recent decades.
For now, however, I plan on keeping my beard. Knowing that it might contain a disease fighting microbe just gives me one more reason.
I didn’t shave my beard all the way off during the first three years of college. Then, during the summer between my junior and senior years of college I got married (with a beard) and shaved off my beard a couple of days after our wedding in order to take a job at a bakery. I kept the beard off for the summer and worked at the bakery. In the fall, when I returned to classes I grew my beard back out. I was twenty years old. I haven’t been clean shaven since.
Our children and grandchildren have never seen me without a beard. None of the congregations I have served in my career as a pastor has seen me without a beard.
The beard has garnered a lot of different reactions over the years. My wife’s grandmother Amy, who never saw me without the beard, used to make a face and say, “I’m not kissing those whiskers.” She kissed me on my forehead instead. After we had been married for a decade I received a report of a conversation that took place in her church. It seems that there was a candidate to become their minister and a group of the women of the church were discussing the candidate. One of the women in the group made a comment about the candidate’s beard. Amy flew to his defense, saying, “My grandson has a beard and he’s a very good minister.” She took to calling me her grandson in her later years, once even introducing my wife and I as “my grandson and his wife,” much to my wife’s dismay.
She kept kissing me on my forehead, however.
I’ve been known to comment that I might shave off the beard, except that as it is I can look in the mirror and see my face and if I think I’m a bit ugly, I can always consider shaving off the beard. If I were to shave the beard off and look in the mirror and discover that I was ugly, there would be no quick solution to the problem.
As a person who has worn a beard for all these years, my skin is a bit tender. I trim the edges of my beard with a razor and if I get a bit aggressive, my skin is pretty sore. Trimming my beard for length is a simple job with electric clippers. From time to time I have a hair stylist trim everything up to keep it straight and neat. My beard grows at about twice the rate of the hair on the top of my head, which is getting pretty thin. I have to trim it every couple of weeks.
In defense of the the practice of wearing a beard, a recent study, published in the Journal of Hospital Infection might be of interest. In the study the faces of 408 hospital staff with and without facial hair were swabbed and tested for infectious substances on their faces. Hospitals have good reasons to see how infections are spread. After all hospital-acquired infections are a major cause of disease and death in hospitals. Previous studies have focused on hands, white coats, ties, and equipment. It makes sense that the hospital might suspect beards as places that might harbor infectious substances.
The researchers, however, were surprised at their results. It was the clean-shaven staff who were more likely to be carrying something unpleasant on their faces. The beardless group were more than three times as likely to be harboring methicillin-resistant staph aureus on their freshly-shaven cheeks. MRSA is very common, but also very troublesome, as a source of hospital-acquired infections.
The researchers have offered several theories about why men with beards are significantly less likely to carry dangerous infections. One theory is that the micro-abrasions in the skin which are caused by shaving may support bacterial colonization and proliferation.
Dr. Adam Roberts, a microbiologist based at University College in London has another theory. He has been harvesting and colonizing bacteria found in beards. He has managed to identify over 100 different types of microbes from beards. Among the microbes are fungi that kill other bacteria. The substance, identified as part of a species called Staphylococcus epidermis, is especially effective at killing a form of E. coli that causes urinary tract infections. It is possible that there are microbes commonly found in beards that are effective at combatting MRSA.
Purifying and properly testing new antibiotics is so expensive and comes with such a high failure rate that it is unlikely that researchers will be harvesting beard microbes in the search for new antibiotics any time soon. There have been no new antibiotics produced in the past 30 years. The need for new antibiotics, however, is increasing. Antibiotic-resistant infections kill at least 700,000 people per hear and it is projected that by 2050 such infections will kill 10 million per year. The need for new antibiotics is evident.
Opinions about beards remain mixed. Alexander the Great banned his soldiers from growing beards, for fear that enemies would hold on to them in battle. The tradition of soldiers being clean shaven has persisted ever since. In Afghanistan, beards have been both compulsory and banned in recent decades.
For now, however, I plan on keeping my beard. Knowing that it might contain a disease fighting microbe just gives me one more reason.