(Image via @thegaybeards, a fun and wildly popular things-in-beards Instagram account run by two men who are infinitely more handsome and hirsute than me)
There is a new thing, the Standard reports this week, a new thing that men do, specifically men with beards, and they do this: they put glitter in their beards for like 13 Instagram likes.
Dudes: please stop putting things in your beards for 13 Instagram likes.
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Here is a picture of a man with glitter in his beard for 13 Instagram likes, and I would like you to take my hand and come with me on a journey, a journey where we zoom out and look down, a journey I like to call “Consider The Logistics”. Consider the logistics: nobody has glitter in their houses, so he had to go and buy that especially. Glitter is tiny sequinned pellets designed to get in every single crevice that you own, so it will have gotten into every single crevice that he owned. He will have glitter in his chest hair now, on his t-shirt. On his jeans and down his sofa. Doesn’t matter how much you hoover, how many lint rollers you go through: weeks later, there will still be glitter fragment stomped through the house, half-glued to the kitchen linoleum, in the dusty corners of underused rooms. This 13 Instagram like dude, in one year’s time, while looking at a carpet: “Oh fucking hell, there’s still some fucki— there’s still fucking glitter down here!”
Dudes: please stop putting things in your beards for 13 Instagram likes.
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There’s flowers, the dudes, they do flowers too. Lego too. This putting things in beards thing sort of a phase that started early last year and Buzzfeed liked it so people kept doing it. And it’s not— no, don’t, it’s not because I am incapable of growing a beard, this isn’t just a case of hormonally-deficient jealousy, it’s more than that. It’s just… I mean there is just no point getting that much glitter everywhere just to—
Dudes: please stop putting things in your beards for 13 Instagram likes.
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I have thick hair and I once put a chopstick in it and it stayed, and I thought, “Huh, okay”. I did not think that was worthy of documentation for the ages. But move it down a few inches into a beard and suddenly – maybe – it is. This is the rub: beard adornment is maybe evidence that we need, if nothing else, a “lowest barrier to entry” for Internet content, a “you must be this tall to ride the rollercoaster” for uploading to Instagram, and that putting a tub of glitter or a lit match in your beard is not it, and anything else is. So, ask yourself: is this tweet I am about to send better than a dude buying and then applying glitter to his beard? Then yes, post it. Is it not? Maybe just save this one to drafts.
Dudes: please stop putting things in your beards for 13 Instagram likes. You are making everything actively worse.
I know a lot of dudes with beards who are great people and fantastic men but I’ve also met a fair few who grew one in lieu of having an actual personality, and I put it to you that it is these beard-havers – not the men who have beards, but the men who have beards and nothing else, the men who are single handedly keeping the “beard oil” market afloat, men who sent an office-all about their Movember and then just never stopped, men who grew a beard and then bought a pea coat and went, ‘Yes, that is me now, I am pea coat beard man’ – and it is they who put wacky shit in their beards and go, “Look!”, and go, “Look at me!” and go, “13 of you better like this on Instagram!”
Dudes: please stop putting things in your beards for 12 Instagram likes. Someone has unliked it, in the time since I started saying this. Someone has thought about it and gone “no”. They have taken the meaningless currency of their digital approval away from you by one unit. You bought a whole thing of glitter of Amazon for this. You accidentally bought a kilo of glitter, dude. What are going to do with all that glitter.
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What is next, is the thing. Because dudes are going to just keep putting ever more absurd things in their beards – jam, Wotsits, frozen vials of jizz, bacon, tealights, Star Wars figurines, Haribo, torn out pages from the Bible, granola, petrol, Panini stickers, Lurpak, socks – that eventually there will be an irreversible rise in things-in-beards and we will collectively say: please stop putting things in your beard. And I think basically what is going to happen for us to get to that point is that someone is going to have to die. Someone is going to have to put uranium or a hand grenade or CJ de Mooi from Eggheads in their beard, and it will kill them, but they will take a photo of it in those brief whispery moments before death, uploading it to Instagram for 13 likes.
Dudes please stop this!
‘Oh it’s just a bit of fun Joel’, you say. ‘Just a little glimmer of hope in this dark and horrid world. It’s a beard with a flower in it, the closest thing Pinterest gets to full pornography. Do you hate fun, Joel?’ And I look at a dude with a beard with glitter in it and with glitter down himself and glitter on his t-shirt, like how I imagine the immediate aftermath of rimming Mariah Carey looks like, and I go: yes. I hate fun.
Dudes please you have to stop putting things in your beards for 13 Instagram likes. You have to. Please. You have to stop.
How many people doing a thing makes up the tipping point of what makes a ‘trend’? I think that, honestly, if there are five or more freely available and well-shot photos of it happening on Instagram, that is enough for it to be a trend. That’s enough to illustrate an article saying ‘this is a trend’. So now I am thinking of the numbers of men who have put glitter in their beard since time began, and it’s probably fewer than 100, but… I mean does that make it less annoying? No.
But then: why am I annoyed by this? I can feel my blood pressure spiking even though it doesn’t affect me in any way. The trite and visible fun of others is making me sadder to be alive. Surely that’s my problem, and not the problem of men with beards having some simple fun on Instagram? Do I need to let go and ease up? Do have problems unseen lurking beneath the dark water of my psyche, ones I need to work out with spoken therapy and inward reflection? I can feel myself unravelling at the edges. Am I the real problem here? Am… am I the cunt?
No: no. The man with a beard full of glitter is, definitely. It’s his fault, not mine. I’m great. I’m good. I’m good. I’m good.
Dudes: please stop putting glitter in your beards for 13 Instagram likes. It’s killing me one cell at a time.
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