From mid-high school to mid-college, I wore a goatee. In the early days it was an untamed mass at the
chin, a clutch of blue-black, tightly curled wires. I was proud of my goatee, proud that I could grow one and proud that I could maintain one. It wasn’t easy. Balance is the key. If you shave too much or too little on one side, you stop looking like Maynard G. Krebs from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and start looking like a recent escapee from the sex offender’s wing of a high-security prison.
That danger is part of the goatee’s allure. Once you’ve invested the days or weeks it takes to grow one, you then must commit to exerting a master’s concentration while shaving. The man who consistently pulls off a balanced goatee has a clear eye and a steady hand. That’s a man you can trust.
But no longer. Because now, some entrepreneur has gone and invented the GoateeSaver, training wheels for the unskilled shavist. I don’t quite know how it works, because it’s stupid, but a “man” basically affixes a device to his face that creates a perfect goatee boundary, ensuring that the razor won’t take off too much on one side.
I can’t argue with the aesthetic results. So long as you’re intelligent enough to stick the GoateeSaver on the center of your face, you’ll end up with a balanced, well-rounded goatee. But at what cost? The loss of a daily exercise in manual dexterity? The antiquation of pride in the free-hand grooming a perfect goatee? The fact that every morning you have to wear something that looks like a pacifier in a David Cronenberg movie?
Yes. All of that.
And more: The GoateeSaver is antithetical to everything The Dopp Kit stands for, namely the ultimate freedom a man has when he runs a deadly sharp razor against his throat and face. If you shave with a GoateeSaver, that goatee is no longer yours. It belongs to the people who run GoateeSaver Co. LLC of Little Rock, Ark. You don’t determine the shape and balance, they do. At that point, why not just shave corporate logos into your beard?
Remember, men: Your face is yours and yours alone. Don’t allow shaving-industry creep to overtake your mug!
(But if anyone wants to go into business for a sideburn mold, call me!)
2 Comments
August 20, 2008 at 4:17 pm
WHO WROTE THIS ONE OMG
August 20, 2008 at 7:30 pm
A pacifier in a Cronenberg movie?
Damn, dude. That’s straight brilliant.
Also: I wholeheartedly endorse your premise. If we grow and groom standardized facial hair, we’ll all look like jerks.