Most men only have one or two styles they could pull off and unfortunately it takes a while to find the right one…I suspect that's a big reason why many won't even try. A light beard isn't usually too great, either, but you can always dye it and use an eyebrow pen to retouch inbetween treatments.
I suspect the trick is to grow a big unruly beard and then plan how you're going to cut it. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get almost a dozen styles out of one beard simply by trimming a little, taking a picture, then trimming a little more until you get to the next style, and so on until the last picture might be the soul patch. With enough planning (and the right genetics) you could do all of his styles in 2011.
I can confirm this with experience! Well, not the every one of his styles in a year part... but at vainer points in my life done the "go mountain-man" approach, followed by many rapid changes in style (one every week for months one year).
I still use the basic technique when switching from a clean state to a bearded state - it si much easier to shape a beard than grow a shaped beard.
Advanced variations on the technique do exist however. I recently went from a van-dyke to what the article calls "the hollywood". However, to appropriately do this I needed to grow out the jaw portion of the beard. So to do this had to take it in phases:
1. stubble out for 2 weeks to get enough base
2. shave to a pattern similar to what the article calls "Rap Industry Standard", but with thicker lines and a full van-dyke at the mouth end.
3. Let it fill in towards the front, keeping the line from sideburns to jaw trimmed short. Also slowly widen the jawline part near the goatee -- a triangle will eventually form.
4. Using a razor, disconnect the sideburns and properly shape the rest.
It seems like there are a number of states (beards), with transitions only being possible between some of those states. Map that all out and it's a graph theory problem - how many can you visit in one go?
We can transform it into a more classic problem (visit every single node) by adding more edges with weights, where the weight is how long it would take to grow enough beard to make an otherwise invalid transition.
What's the minimal number of such beard-paths required to cover the beard-graph, and what's the best algorithm to construct such a cover? Now, suppose we weight each beard-vertex by how long it takes to grow -- what's the least-weight beard-path cover, where the weight of a beard-path is determined by the maximum-weight (starting) beard-vertex?
Well you can get from any beard to any other with time and a trim, so the graph would be complete, and thus have n(n-1)/2 edges. As for constructing the cover, I guess you could divide the face into the relevant areas (sideburns, lower sideburns, cheek, center chin, edge chin, middle moustache, edge moustache, moustache to chin connectors, etc) and note how long each section is for a given beard style. Given the rate of hair growth (or if it's non-linear, an equation for the time to get from one length to another), you can then work out how much growth (if any) is required to get from one style to another.
I'm confident the graph construction can be done in poly time (O(n^2) edges), solving it is harder obviously! However, if this work is correct, we have a polytime reduction to TSP, thus showing that the "beard problem" is NP-complete.
Edit: Crap, that's the wrong way round to show NP completeness isn't it? You'd have to show that, given a TSP problem you can reformulate it as a beard problem. I'm not sure if a beard problem necessarily exists for every TSP problem, I'll think on it...
Update: Ok, the first part is to make sure we can represent all the nodes / edges, and we can. We just need to increase the number of segments (areas of hair growth we are concerned with) to match the number of nodes. If we have three nodes, A, B, C, then we need three areas corresponding to them. For a given node, we set the area corresponding to it to the maximum distance between that node and other nodes. Once this is done, we set the other areas so that the distance, in hair growth, from each node to the others matches the graph. This then works.
However, this only works for a complete graph. I can't think of a way to easily resolve that, i.e. make it not permissable to get from some nodes to others without going via intermediaries... You could make it so going from one beard style to another means you will have a third along the way, but it seems non-trivial to enforce that.
So, we can reduce TSP on a complete graph to a beard problem. I think we can maybe convert a non-complete TSP to a complete one by adding arbitrarily heavy edges? However, this would necessitate extremely long beards, perhaps impossibly long. Thoughts?
I was imagining a simpler model, where different areas of the beard are either present or not; length doesn't matter. If you're growing one part out, you might as well grow all of it out. Therefore, in this model, you only "grow" to the full beard vertex.
I'm not sure that your reduction from TSP works. Given two nodes A and B, I understand that you're setting their distance on the associated facial areas to match the distance in TSP, but what if they're forced to be even more distant on the area corresponding to some other node C?
There is also a good sitcom skit. See "how I met your mother". Man, I don't know what episode. I think the one where he breaks up with robin, grows a breakup beard and says, "You're suited up, I'm bearded down..." see all the styles they got out of just one shaving session! :)
Smogzer's method for "How to see yourself in every beard type" :
1) Grow a huge beard.
2) Put yourself in a comfortable and repeatable pose, i.e. fixate a point in space, shoulders back, make sure you are able to repeat the position you are in.
3) pick 1-5 camera poses around you.
4) with your huge beard take pictures from every camera position in various lighting settings, or have a friend do it.
5) shave, standing in place if it has to.
6) take pictures again.
7) with photoshop or gimp overlay the beard picture on top of the beardless one and delete and clone parts of your beard !
8) since this is hacker news, the post would not be complete if you do not:
8.1) create a startup from it ;)
I'd love to grow all these beards, but unfortunately I have the facial-hair-growing capability of Ethan Hawke (except I had enough sense to give it up when it didn't pan out).
Yeah ... it saddens me that the only thing I could muster is the "The Pencil", and even that would look funny on me. Oh well, at 24 I guess it's time I accept that I won't be able to grow a beard :)
My friends and I did a "Beard-tober" a year ago -- no shaving for the entire month of October. It didn't change my life - I just looked like a guy with a light colored and somewhat patchy beard.
Try growing one for a minimum of six months. It takes dedication and courage. At the very least, it's a great social experiment. You'll encounter prejudice, admiration, and endless hours of fun like the guy in the link!
Also noteworthy: the type of girls I meet when bearded are of a very different type than the type I meet when not bearded. (not better or worse, just a whole different experience)
Particularly when I keep my beard tuned to "vaguely edgy".
Of course you'll have to learn to put up with lots of looks of disapproval, and old ladies holding their purses tighter around you, but that is worth it in its own right too.
