Let’s face it, bearded men, thinking up a great costume just isn’t as easy as it is for our non-bearded brethren.  Lots of hilarious celebrity ideas idea go out the window along with any current politician.  Masks are out… why hide that glorious beard you’ve worked so hard to grow and maintain?  As a result of my own personal frustrations, I’ve decided to create this list as a reference for future Halloweens.  In the brotherly spirit of the bearded community, I want to share it with all of you.

#1: Paul Bunyan

Items Needed:
Work Boots
Blue Jeans
Buffalo Plaid Flannel Shirt
Suspenders
Wool ski cap
Axe

This is a super easy one as most bearded guys have these items lying around anyway.  I know I do.  When I first thought of this idea, I was pretty excited until I looked in the mirror and realized I was already wearing the “costume” minus the suspenders, hat, and axe.
Note: Please don’t ask your wife to be Babe the Blue Ox.  Trust me on this one.

#2: Zeus/Socrates/Pythagoras

Items Needed:
White Sheet
Safety pins
Sandals
Cardboard lightning bolt if Zeus
Cup of hemlock poison (fake!) if Socrates
Cardboard right triangle if Pythagoras

Let’s hearken back to the glory days of beards… ancient Greece!  A sheet is not ideal toga material, but it will get the job done.  Just fold it so that it is only about 3 feet wide.  Then wrap the folded sheet around your waist 1.5 times, pin it together, and throw the rest over a shoulder.  Bring the material back down to the waist and pin it again.  Choose an accessory to make and get into character.  Smite people with your thunderbolt!  Pretend to poison thyself!  Teach people math!

#3: Gorton’s Fisherman

Items Needed:
Yellow vinyl rain suit
Sky blue scarf
Hair gel
Cornstarch

If you are okay giving Gorton’s some free advertising, this is another super easy costume.  Just wear whatever you want and wrap the scarf around your neck.  Put on the rain suit and you are good to go!  Now for the distinctive white beard.  If you have already attained a naturally white beard, you can ignore the following.  However, if you need a bit of help, just comb a small amount of hair gel into your beard and liberally dust it with cornstarch.  It would also be pretty great if you baked up a mess of fish sticks and gave them out to people instead of candy.

#4: Alan Garner – i.e. Zach Galifianakis’ character from The Hangover

Items Needed:
This T-Shirt
White Jeans
Baby Bjorn
Baby doll
White baby ski cap
Blue baby shirt

Finally, a hip pop-culture-reference costume for a bearded guy! Even if you haven’t seen The Hangover, if you can scrounge up all the above items, all you have to do if put them on and keep saying, “It would be so cool if I could breast-feed.”  People will love it!  No jokes, people are buying terrible fake beards to be this guy for Halloween.  Be glad you can one-up them with the real deal on your face.

#5: Fidel Castro

Items Needed:
Green Army fatigues
Castro Hat (of course!)
Cigar

Lastly, another easy and recognizable costume for the bearded man.  To really pull this one off, you have to have a pretty big beard; because, honestly, love him or hate him, Fidel has always had a great one.  Beyond that, it’s just a matter of putting on the right clothes and carrying that ever-present cigar.  If you could somehow borrow a friend’s old rusty 1950’s Packard and drive it around blaring revolutionary rhetoric, that would be ideal.

There you have it, my bearded friends.  A good five year’s worth of costumes.  But there’s no reason to sit around to keep on brainstorming.  Help me expand the list even more by adding your own ideas in the comment section!

Happy Halloween, everybody!  As you can see, I like to get in the spirit of the season by having a good old-fashioned pumpkin carving.  I think my friend above fits right in here at The Beard Coach, don’t you?

Halloween, for the beard fan, is filled with things that make him or her light up with delight, quite like a Jack o’ Lantern if you will.  It is a time for people of all ages and sexes to don fake beards.  Nothing tickles me quite like seeing a bearded six-year-old.  I think one reason is that it reminds me so much of the year that I dressed up as a pirate for my trick-or-treating adventure.

I’m not sure where they got the idea, but Mom and Dad gave me the best fake beard ever that year.  Sure the homemade pirate costume would have been sweet as it was, complete with silver spray-painted cardboard hook and Mom’s clip-on earring.  But the greatest part was definitely the fake beard.  Have I hyped it up enough yet?  I probably can’t.  It was that awesome.

As my Halloween treat to you, here’s how you can give any non-bearded person an amazing fake beard.

Materials Needed:

Any thick, sticky, edible substance (i.e. honey, corn syrup, molasses, sorghum)

Ground coffee (unused!)

Step 1: Wash and dry the beard-wearer’s lower face.  This is especially important for the kids.  You don’t want that Kool-Aid moustache peeking through the one you’re creating.

Step 2: Use your hands to apply the sticky foodstuff to the subject’s face where you want the beard to be.  Feel free to get creative.  Just be sure to look at where real beards fall on men’s faces.  Don’t get too high up on the cheek or too low on the neck.

Step 3: Use your hands to pat dry coffee grounds onto the now-sticky areas of the subject’s face.  Be sure to get a nice even coating.  Don’t skimp!  I recommend doing this outside or over a sink so that the excess grounds can fall where they may.  If you’re good, you could even try to catch the excess in your coffee maker’s basket and brew up a pot!

Step 4: Just try not to smile at the insanely good fake beard you just made.

Helpful Tips:

• Don’t use your good coffee.  That’s for drinkin’! Get to the store and buy the cheap stuff.
• Don’t send your child to trick-or-treat in bear country.  This is probably good all-around advice anyway.
• Don’t be too obvious when smelling the bearded person’s face.  Because this beard smells amazing.

There you have it!  And you thought I only coached people on real beards.

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That’s right, gents.  National Beard Month (i.e. November) is nearly upon us!  Time to get that Novembeard going!  And you know who’ll help you find beard success.  That’s right.  Ye Olde Beard Coach.  Now, sign up and grow it.

If you’ve read The Beard Manifesto, you know how I feel about “winter beards.”  But I’m willing to set those feelings aside for the spirit of national beardedness.  Hey, you never know, some fellow may grow out a beard next month as a gag and end up falling madly in love.  How many of you guys came to be permanently bearded by starting a joke beard?

Hey, whatever it takes to get more beards flowing from sea to shining sea, people.  Hey, I know, let write a patriotic beard song!  In honor of National Beard Month.  I’ll go for it if you will.  Keep your eyes and ears peeled for amazing bearded patriotism the likes of which have never been seen or heard in this fine land.

Until then, get over to the National Beard Month Facebook page and become a fan.  I did.  And it felt right.

The next installment in my series of interviews with other Internet-using beard-loving people is with Michael from the popular site Beard Revue. His site is just bristling with beard goodness.  First Thursday Beard Art is a highlight as well as some quite indisputable beard ratings.

The Beard Coach: What was your inspiration for diving into the world of beard blogging?

Michael: Beard Revue is the result of a convergence of three main interests: my unflagging admiration for beards, snobby indie hipster music and social media. My unflagging admiration for beards is self-explanatory.

The hipster music bit comes from my love of the assumed authority with which Pitchfork approaches its reporting and album reviews. Pitchfork is often divisive—a lot of folks hate their reviews. But I think they’re witty, and often way to serious about themselves for me not to laugh. (They recently rated every Beatle album on their arbitrary 0.0–10.0 scale. Was that necessary? No. Was it informative, amusing and incredibly pretentious? Yes.) And my interests in social media stems from my friend Joshua’s challenge to maintain a blog longer than three months. I did, and now it’s popular.

TBC: From what I can tell, Beard Revue is a pretty darn popular beard site.  What kind of traffic are you getting?

Michael: Find out for yourself at alexa.com.  (Editor’s note: Beard Revue has an Alexa rank of 735,874 as of today.)

TBC: Has Beard Revue panned out the way you had planned it?  Or has the road taken some unforeseen twists?

Michael: No. It’s become more popular than I initially thought and the format has changed as my interests and goals have changed. In fact, I’ve recently partnered with a crack team of developers to see how Beard Revue can accommodate more user generated content. I can’t really say more than that, though.

TBC: Your beard poster is fantastic! Any other handcrafted beard art lying around the house?

Michael: Thanks!  Probably the most rewarding thing from Beard Revue is the community of artists to whom I’ve been exposed. I love all the little things that beards and moustaches inspire (thus, First Thursday Beard Art). I love that tattoo trend—the one where you get a ’stache tat on the side of your index finger and hold it up over your lip. Sometimes it’s just some one with a Sharpie and not a tattoo. It’s benign and it makes me smile every time I see a photo of one.

And so then there’s everything else. I’m a print designer by trade. So I have beard posters, prints and even Jack Passion’s first book in my collection of all things beardy. And the library affords me the opportunity to bone up on some beardage from time to time. Who knew there was so much beardstuff out there?

TBC: What is your take on the state of the beard today?

Michael: Save for the Victorian era, same as it’s always been. The beard is for the fringes of society. The artists, intellectuals, vagrants and anyone who’s willing to wear the badge of being different. Recession and playoff beards are fleeting moments of solidarity, but don’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things.

TBC: Name your 3 favorite bearded people.

Michael: Abbey Road and All Things Must Pass era George Harrison takes the cake. I just saw Kyp Malone last week, so I’ll say him. And my father, of course.

TBC: Name the top 3 people you wish had a beard.

Michael: James Beard (that guy totally wasted his name). I’d love to see Barack Obama don a beard like Malone’s. And anyone I’ve ever met who said they would grow a beard but just weren’t capable of growing one.

TBC: Why do you think people enjoy beards?

Michael: They serve such a wide range of functions for the wearer and the viewer, it’d be difficult to pinpoint one thing. That little bit of rugged panache can go a long way. I like that they’re natural. Since they’re both manifestations of our mature states, this might be an apt analogy:

Beard : Naked Face :: Natural Breasts : Implants

TBC: Please briefly tell your favorite beard-related story.

Michael: People do some funny things for facial hair. I had a wicked awesome handlebar moustache for Moustache May which garnered a lot of attention. Some one photographed me for their scavenger hunt, a gentleman almost got hit by a car crossing the street just to say “hi, nice moustache” and BT Livermore gave me a complementary tin of Man’s Face Stuff moustache wax. My favorite compliment was when a sweet young lass called me a walking sex toy.

TBC: Much of my site is devoted to beard-growing motivation. What is your best advice for guys who are currently growing a beard?

Michael: Have fun with it.

When I started The Beard Coach a couple months ago, I didn’t realize the extent of the existing beard website community.  There are a lot of cool people making equally cool beard sites!  As a newcomer to the scene, I could think of no better way to get to know the community than by interviewing the people behind the sites I think are great.

The first person kind enough to subject themselves to the hard-hitting, in-depth reporting I have absolutely no formal training to provide was Erin Dollar from I Made You A Beard.  Visit her site and you will soon find that she will indeed make you a beard.  And it will be awesome.

Alright, on to the interview!

The Beard Coach: I see that you’ve been beard blogging for about a year now.  How long have you been making beards?

Erin: I’ve been making beards for about 2 ½  years now. It all started one summer day right before I graduated from college. I should have been working on my final projects and thesis, but my brain was starting to crack from the stress, so I started working on a “just for fun” project. Who knew this distraction would end up being something I would be working on for so long!?

TBC: Describe the inspiration behind the first beard you made.

Erin: I think there were a lot of things influencing that first beard. A guy I knew was traveling to Germany for the World Beard and Moustache Championships, which I thought was amazing. I think the actual design of the beard was based more on drawings and illustrations I had been looking at lately, but I look back and wonder if I wasn’t trying to level the playing field a little bit, so maybe women could compete in Germany

TBC: What did it feel like to put on that first beard?

Erin: Hilarious. The first beard took hours and hours to sew, so it was a pretty gratifying.

TBC: Obviously you enjoy homemade beards and beard drawings.  What about the real deal?

Erin: Honestly, I love seeing beards in the real world, but I’ve never dated a guy with a full bushy beard.  This isn’t to say that I don’t find them fascinating, I really have a lot of respect for guys who put  effort into their beard, it can look really cool. But yeah, as much as I joke about it, I’m glad I don’t have a real one.

TBC: What is your take on the state of the beard today?

Erin: There are too many lazy beard growers out there. Beards have the potential to be really awesome… or super gross. Don’t believe any lady who says that the first thing she sees on a guy is his eyes; she’s looking at your half-assed goatee and wondering why she bothered to get out of bed this morning.

TBC: Name your 3 favorite bearded people.

Erin: Edward Gorey, Charles Darwin, and Kyp Malone. Frida Kahlo comes in fourth with her most excellent moustache.

TBC: Name the top 3 people you wish had a beard.

Erin: Barack Obama (so the Lincoln metaphors could REALLY take hold), Dave Eggers (sometimes he has this little soul patch thing that really bugs me), and Al Gore (am I the only one who thought he looked better with a beard?)

TBC: Why do you think people enjoy beards?

Erin: I think it depends. Extra warmth in the winter? Kitsch value? Shaving sucks? I’m not sure what the ultimate draw is, but I think when people see a properly maintained and groomed beard, it just looks… right.

TBC: Please briefly tell your favorite beard-related story.

I don’t know if I have a favorite, but seeing guys with long beards on bicycles is possibly the greatest thing ever. The wind pushes the beard back over the shoulders, and it just looks magical.

TBC: Much of my site is devoted to beard-growing motivation.  What is your best advice for guys who are currently growing a beard?

Erin: The trick seems to be getting through the awkward itchy/ugly period when nothing is really growing in quite right. I’d advice novice beard growers to take a solo vacation at this point, so you can hang out and wait for your beard to look top notch, all while sipping drinks by the beach. When you return, everyone will be shocked by your perfectly grown-in beard, not to mention your new tan.

TBC: Erin, thanks for the insight into the mind behind I Made You A Beard.  Best bearded wishes to you!