Over the course of this afternoon I have received five messages from my mother about beards and it is only four o'clock.
I don't know whether to hope for or to anticipate more beard-related messages.
I'm not even sure how long I want to spend thinking about beards.
As my mother seems to have noticed, beards are very much en vogue at the moment, particularly with men in their mid to late 20s.
Perhaps I have somewhat naively put this down to men reaching an age where they are actually able to grow a beard (sans humiliating bare patches) and going a little wild.
Myriad text messages from my mum seem to suggest that there might be something a little more conspiratorial going on.
The beards showing up on one in three men in Wellington (according to my mother) and a few privileged individuals around here are largely immaculately groomed Edwardian masterpieces.
I can only imagine the time and effort that goes into waxing those babies every morning, and I hardly like to imagine the horror-inducing acne that moustache grease must cause.
While these beards might hark back to a more socially and sexually conservative time period, I'm guessing that most men sporting beards in their early twenties aren't seeking to give off a brusque Victorian politesse vibe.
Maybe there has been a spike in advertising for facial haircare products?
Maybe someone at Hair Care HQ found an abandoned warehouse (or several) overflowing with beard clippers and moustache curling tongs.
What might be more likely is that in some respects it has become a little bit more acceptable for men to start caring about self-grooming again.
I'd never put this down to all that nonsense people spew about the new-age effeminate male who has been so wrongly stripped of all his masculine power in this frightening, dystopian age of female empowerment.
Instead, I would suggest that companies have realised they can squeeze more money out of people if they target men as well as women.
And that maybe foolish men who believe this narrative of lost masculinity might try to crawl back to some outdated notion of facial hair equating maleness.
Probably men with beards aren't actually sitting around thinking about their beards all that much.
Most people when making purely aesthetic life choices don't tend to spend all that much time analysing why they might be doing so.
And growing a beard could be really fun or really easy or really satisfying, I wouldn't know.
But for whatever reason, this year people are flustered about beards.
A quick perusal of the blogging platform Tumblr shows that young men and young women alike are particularly moved by a soft-looking man with a big beard.
What kind of gender politic this is indicative of I'm not certain.
Anecdotal evidence from my own friends would suggest beards are a big deal.
I was once forced to watch a multitude of videos of a sad man singing with a guitar because he had a nice beard.
I'm now left wondering if perhaps growing a beard was not fun for him because he really did seem very sad.
I used to associate beards primarily with older men, but according to Mum, these older men might soon be outnumbered.
Beards are taking over the retail, coffee, sporting and cultural sectors.
Personally, I worry about food getting stuck in facial hair and staying there for some time, but it's not my place to judge where and how other people keep their bodily hair.
As of ten to five I have received my sixth message about beards.
Apparently the odds have changed - to one in four with beards.
-Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
