If you know anything at all about beards, please write some articles on what you know – right now.  A wiki only becomes great if people muster the courage to contribute.  Since we The Bearded are known for our courage, this shouldn’t be a problem.

I just recreated the database and restored the previous files.  Sadly, that just took us all back in time to January.  That means no winner to the beard playoffs (Brett Kiesel) and no Beard Wiki (was not lost and will be back shortly).

Thanks for your patience as I get the site back up and running between juggling my full-time job, college coursework to meet continuing education requirements for said job, and raising my eight-month-old daughter!

Matchup #1: 9 seed vs. 10 seed

Matchup #2: 7 seed vs. 8 seed

I’ve taken their top ten beards and put them in a bracket according to their ranking in the video.  Each round will get a week of voting here at the Beard Coach.  Voting for each round will run Sunday to Saturday.  Look for the first round to be up for voting this Sunday.

Spread the word… get your whole beard crew to vote.  Let’s see who has the greatest NFL beard according to actual beard aficionados!

Click the bracket below for a closer look.

My beard is not quite to that length that I can try yet, but it is fairly straight
and scraggly especially the ends. What effect will a curling iron have on coarser
hair? I am wondering if it would look OK?

Good question!  I say we start by turning to the history books for our answer.  Here’s a nice image of an Akkadian sculpture of Sargon, their greatest ruler.

Do you know your ancient history?  We’re talking about a culture that can claim title to establishing the first empire ever!  This beard style was not limited to the Akkadians, though.  You can find similar beard images from many early Mesopotamian cultures, such as the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Arameans, and the Medians (pre-Persians).

If you look closely at the image above or many other ancient sculptures, you can see that the subject’s beard appears to be in ringlets.  One could hypothesize that it was easier to sculpt a curly beard, but I can’t reason that this was truly the case.  How hard would it have been to sculpt a straight beard?  Wouldn’t chiseling out ringlets be much more difficult than carving out straight textures?  Plus, look at the head hair of the sculpture above.  No detail whatsoever despite the fact that the majority of ancient Mesopotamians probably had curly hair.  Why only sculpt the beard as curled?  Because a man’s beard was purposefully curled, and because his beard was a more important cultural icon than the hair of the head.

There exists further proof that ancient men did indeed curl their beards.  Here’s an image of a set of ancient Egyptian bronze curling tongs.

Those things probably curled many a beard in their day.  Note the sharpened blade at the bottom.  Clearly this artifact was used to trim hair and also curl it when necessary.  A brilliant 2-in-1 device.

Ancient men curled, oiled, and perfumed their beards for centuries.  Many even braided theirs with gold fibers for festivals.  A man’s beard was something to be adorned and reveled in at special times of the year – much like the Christmas trees of the current Western holiday season.

This beard-celebrating tradition continued well into the peak of Greek culture.  The Greeks used heated tongs to curl their beards in the style illustrated below.

Sadly, the culture of long curled beards ended when Alexander the Great ordered that his soldiers be clean-shaven so that enemy soldiers would have fewer things to grab onto during battle.  Apparently this idea was valid seeing as how he conquered pretty much the entire known world at the time.  Too bad his soldiers looked like little boys.

Anyway, to directly answer the question, hell yes men can curl their beards!   In fact it may be time for all of us to start taking care and carefully styling our beards again.  I feel the beard gaining in popularity with mainstream people these days.  It’s time for we innovators to take the next step.  Shall we start to curl our beards?  Maybe perfume them?  Or even dust them with gold powder as our ancient bearded brethren did?