So I recently got thinking about why the heck we men get facial hair. I mean, what purpose does it serve? if I let my beard and moustache grow, it would basicaly just mean I had a giant pillow stuck to my face with cookie crumbs and tangles in it. Eating becomes a game of trying to thread a needle by sticking a fork in a specially crafted mouth hole in the web of hair.

Of course, nobody let’s their beard grow. Except hippies. But they don’t count. Those that do keep beards and moustaches do so more for fashion and appearance than any functional purpose. Like noserings, I’ve always thought of a full beard or moustache as putting one at a disadvantage, because it just gives people something to pull on.

Some may wonder how this doesn’t apply also to a head of hair. Well, hair on our head actually evolved to protect the environment, see if everybody was bald and had a shiny head, the amount of energy being reflected off our chromium domes would add to the greenhouse gas effect, or something equally badly thought out. More practically, it keeps our heads warm. Moustaches don’t really do anything, aside from get in the way. Beards don’t keep our chins warm. Besides why would we need our chins warm anyway. Surely we could go for furry hands or furry feet instead.

This brings us back to my original idea: at this point it’s just an appearance thing. I guess it’s just a vestigial result of our evolution. (Or, for theologians, I guess god decided men should have hair on their faces for no particular reason). It’s interesting because you can look totally different when you shave a full beard or moustache to the point where people might not recognize you. The latter is true too but only if somebody hadn’t seen you since you started to grow it; if you deal with somebody daily you won’t notice the slowly growing beard and/or moustache. But it can also be used to determine if somebody is evil. a “hitler-style” moustache is not really socially acceptable, which I always thought was a bit weird. Are people with the same colour eyes as him also socially awkward? well, not really. But also if I was to give myself some goofy beard and/or moustache appearance, and take over the world gruesomely, aside from being an epic reign of terror, surely the future would then shun people using my funky beard and/or moustache style.

Anyway I forgot where I was going with this. I wonder if maybe people with big moustaches have like extrasensory perception, like cat whiskers, so they know that if they are going head first into a narrow area their entire body will fit because their whiskers do. I doubt that, though. our hair is critical to our sense of touch everywhere but the front of our hands, really.

One could argue that our fingernails aren’t useful either but they serve as a counterweight on which the fleshy ends of our succulent fingers grip objects. Without the nail, most of our digits would just have flabby shapeless blobs on the ends.