Jeff Corbett: The real reason beards are so interesting

We all have face, of course, the image we present to the world in the hope that we'll be seen as we want to be seen, and for the most part it is a concoction. Which is why beards are so interesting.

We know that men with beards are hiding, perhaps even cringing, behind it, and the most interesting thing about that is that bearded men are not all cringing for the same reason.

Take the hipster's designer beard, the carefully shaped and almost always black mass that he hopes will make him look a little like a terrorist and will be his personal statement against stereotyping.

Men become hipsters so that they can justify their fascination with their appearance, to be the urban sophisticate, and to help overcome their embarrassment at the way they walk.

If they can't grow a thick and black beard, or at least one thick enough to dye black, most stay as they are, embarrassed and shaven, because there's nowhere else right now for them to hide. A hipster with a ginger, brown or blond beard doesn't cut it, and you can pick these disappointed aspirants by the way they walk.

They could grow a scabby goatee and a mullet and move west, but becoming a credible westy would require a new set of genes for anyone born and raised east of the coastal range. And they'd have to give up their job, get a few jail tats and find a missus who wears a tent dress.

Westies have goatees and mullets and plaited rat tails because they want to be seen as bikies, or at least as tough as bikies, and bikies grow goatees studded with insect shells because they wouldn't look at all tough with their podgy jowls and pink fatty chins bared for all to see.

Then there is the academic goatee, an anally snipped map of Tasmania that is meant to stamp these usually cheery men as learned. These men are often entertaining, and not just because of their comical affectations.

Men who strive to be eccentric must have the hermit's shaggy beard to camouflage the pretence, a beard they stroke as they pontificate, while genuine, uncontrived eccentrics are content with what they see as their unremarkable persona and are usually clean shaven.

The stubble has always been a mystery to me, and it has appeared that even though cultivated and trimmed it is meant to suggest a certain nonchalance. But recently I've realised that the stubble is an expression of the wearer's inner Harvey Weinstein.

Men grow a beard because they come to believe that things will be better if they are seen differently, when they want to draw the curtain on their failure to hit the target. And I’ve always suspected the failing is often one of a sexual nature. The beard is the curtain, and we should accept the new face as kindly as possible.

Of course the beard is not the only means of designing face.

The ponytail is another, a sad attempt to hang onto an image that was for the great majority only ever a dream. You know, when the ponytail was the stamp of the creative guru, and the fact that the few genuine gurus were accompanied everywhere by a bevy of beauties made the ponytail even more attractive to the duds.

Ponytails are an invitation to be pulled, which may be why the attention-seeking ponytailers wear them, and in the aftermath you could ask if he's considered having pig tails instead.

The man bun is the new ponytail, and its message seems to be that the wearer is so confident of his masculinity that he can get away with something as silly as a bun. Usually greasy, often worn as a visual diversion by hipsters whose beard doesn't make the grade.

Earrings worn by men who should be beyond the foolishness of youth are another desperate clutching of salad days long after the salad has become slimy.

The single earring threaded through a lobe or another part of the ear is meant to tell us that he is naturally hip, that he was never a follower of fashion, and I wonder whether the wearer knows what it does tell us. He doesn't care, he'll protest a little too enthusiastically, but the fact is that if he didn't care he wouldn't bother to wear it.

Discs in stretched lobes tells us that the wearer was a goose and still is. Honk when you see him.

I've talked myself out of a beard, and a ponytail and an earring was never a starter. I'll stick with the mo, an understated expression of manly grace.