Thinking about growing a beard?  Here is the first thing that you should know about making that decision: forget about whether beards are in fashion or not.  Grow a beard because you want to grow a beard, not to follow a trend.  If beards seem to be “in fashion”, that’s great.  The more popular beards are, the better.  Nevertheless, whether they are popular or not, grow your beard because it is what you want to do.  That decision should never be dictated by the whims of fashion.

Click on photo for full image.

At 1:59 PM PDT on August 1, 2009, the view count for the galleries hit nine million!  Which was the winning, nine-millionth photo?  It was this one of Dave, in one of his rare goatee appearances:

Click on the photo above to see the larger, gallery version of the photo.  Next up: ten million!

Great beards should be photographed.

The documentary beard project formally has a home on beards.org now.  The first photo album is that of Brian, starting out with twelve photos.  There will be much more to come — in Brian’s album and others.  Click on the image above to go there.

A friendly gentleman with an amazing beard used to run the Hess gas station in front of Manassas Mall in Virginia.  He kept the massive full beard pretty much all of the time, but occasionally would shave it off and commence re-growing it again right away.  One time when he was in the early stages of growing the beard again, I looked at his beard in awe and thought to myself that the beard growth was so dense and abundant, that it appeared to gush out from his face.  He was a beard gusher — an extraordinary sight, indeed!

I would guess that he has long-since retired by now.  I haven’t been to Virginia in many years.  Still, I’ll never forget the sight of that powerful beard.  Beards like his are rarely seen.  This makes an excellent case for documentary beard photography.  Great beards should be photographed!

Billy Mays photo by beards.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.flickr.com.

Billy Mays unexpectedly passed from this life on June 28, 2009.  Billy was a famous pitch man on television, enthusiastically selling a variety of products.  Through his work on television and personal appearances, Billy Mays became a celebrity.  Just as famous as Billy himself was his dark full beard.  Billy demonstrated to the world that a full-bearded man could appear in advertising and achieve great success.  For that, I say, “Thank you, Billy.”

Congratulations to David Traver for winning first place in the Freestyle Full Beard category as well as overall World Beard Champion!  I extend my hearty congratulations to the winners in all the other categories and to all of the competitors as well.

Special congratulations go to John of Georgia from our beards of the world gallery for winning third place in the Full Beard Garibaldi category.  Congratulations, John!  Here is a photo of John taken well before the 2009 championships:

Support the team and grow a beard!  In addition, you’ll be helping out a children’s charity:  Garden of Dreams.

Join today!  Click on the image above to visit the site and check it out.  Visit often to check out the beard progress and rate the beards!

Tell all your friends.  Have them join up, too!   Now get growing!

Three months and one day after hitting seven million photo gallery views, at 17:20 PDT we hit eight million!  Luckily, I happened to be around at the time to watch the counter hit eight million.  Which was the lucky eight-millionth photo?  It was this one of Steven from our featured beards section:

Click on the image above to see the larger version.

After a much-too-long hiatus, the beards.org documentary beard photography project resumed activity yesterday with another original beard photo shoot.  Dale, with his amazing beard growth, kindly agreed to the beard photo shoot.  Here are some preview shots from March 20th, 2009.