The fortune of facial hair has waxed and waned for five thousand years. If your archbishop said shave, you did so to avoid hell’s fire. If your sovereign’s beard caught fire, you sympathetically removed your own. Any student of history can appreciate the vagaries of the male ego and the impositions of vanity, but until 150 years ago, removing the beard was no simple task...

First you had to find and hire someone you trusted, or wait in endless lines at the barber shop where you might catch something or be robbed. Then you had to endure the pain as your man worked unassisted by such luxuries as proper lighting, hot water, foam, or anything resembling a sharp, unrusty razor blade. He might even top things off by singeing your whiskers using a candle. For centuries, it was inconceivable that you might try any of these shaving techniques at home on your own face. This was an act of necessity, a painful price for belonging to a particular group or class, not an act of lavish self-pampering as we interpret the ritual today.


Depiction of Sweeny Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street "Easy shaving for a penny, As good as you will find any."

Having said that, despite everything modern domestic technology has to offer, I must confess that I still hate shaving. In fact, many of my personal forays into facial hair were prompted by loathing of the blade and sheer indolence. I’d classify such growth as “the ambivalent beard.” Frankly, short of a few fetishists, I don’t know anyone, male or female, who enjoys scraping sharp metal over skin. Yet we spend billions for shaving implements (I am anxiously waiting for the quintuple-blade razor head) and perform the ritual daily. And shavers have their share of detractors: as we’ll see in Chapter 7, psychoanalysts tell us that shaving is an act of auto-castration to quell Oedipal desires. The Beard Liberation Front of London, a hirsute human rights group, informs us shavers that we are suffering from internalized beardophobia: we’d rather mutilate ourselves than experience the discrimination linked to all the negative stereotypes about facial hair so prevalent in modern society. Many men shave because their partners prefer it, especially when engaging in intimacy, as bristles abrade facial and genital skin. (Women are, at best, split 50-50 in their appreciation of beards, with women over forty generally preferring “a clean-shaven man,” while twenty-somethings are more likely to describe “facial fungus” as hot-looking.) Shaving may also be like circumcision – if your dad was “cut,” you are more likely to follow suit.



Whatever the reason, shaving is a huge multinational industry that, through clever and powerful marketing, continually seduces us to remove, dye, and precision-trim what would otherwise sprout naturally. As a razorphobe, I simply had to find out who came up with this bright idea in the first place.

Any history of beards naturally begs a parallel history of shaving. The god Mercury was said to have invented the razor, but credit for hair removal actually goes to the much less glamorous. We may think of Stone-Agers as universally fuzzy, but by 100,000 bc, man was engaging in activities that some modern primitives still enjoy – filing teeth, tattooing the body, and using seashells to pluck out hair. All this is enthusiastically documented in detail in early cave paintings.


Flint could provide an extremely sharp edge for shaving; these were, of course, the first disposable shavers because flint becomes dull rather quickly. (7 cm = 2.8 in)

By 30,000 bc, the first disposable razors made of sharp flint appeared; they must have been wretchedly painful. These razors became particularly popular with hunters and gatherers (though what could motivate someone to shave in the bush is something of a mystery to me). Anthropologists now tend to believe that a bearded face lends a man a dominant ferocity, with ape-like “jaw jut” a sign of aggression. The reasons why some prehistoric men removed their facial hair, given the inconvenience and agony, is open to speculation. Perhaps the shorn were required to demonstrate submissiveness to their leader, or maybe Wilma and Betty simply preferred a smooth puss.

By the Bronze Age, metal innovations led to the creation of permanent copper razors. Iron blades first appeared in 1,000 bc. By 300 bc, Egyptians took the whole shaving trend to heart, as they resolutely believed that head, facial, and body hair were animalistic and uncivilized. Priests shaved off their hair and their entire bodies at least once every three days, grooming techniques that were recorded in hieroglyphics. Wealthy Egyptians kept full-time barbers on staff, but for those Egyptians less rich and in need of a shave, specific street corners bristled (as it were) with barber shops. Razors became more elaborate – gold-plated, engraved, and encrusted with jewels – and were buried (as we discover when we desecrate tombs) with royalty. Any enduring stone images of the hirsute from that time represent peasants, madmen, slaves, or, not surprisingly, what were later called barbarians. However, as evidenced earlier, the idea that beards were symbolic of power was not lost on the Egyptians. Both men and women wore postiches, or fancy fake metallic beards, for special occasions, like solar eclipses and the flooding of the Nile. Meanwhile, the Sumerians were perfecting a tweezer device for more precise plucking.


Razor and mirror, New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, early co-reign of Thutmose III and Hatshepsut, ca. 1479–1473 B.C. METROPOLITAN MUSEUM

Link: The Anti-Beard: A History of Shaving ~ Part 2


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