Facial hair in the youth culture

In today's update, I am going to share something I discovered with my 16 year old son. He has the latest video game console, as seems to be a point of social measurement in his age group, and part of this game include the ability to play online with other friends. In order to do this he needed parental approval due to the nature of the online experience, and as we worked our way through the preferences we arrived at the avatar creation. this is a process whereby one can make a custom pixelated representation of them self in ways that would not be possible in the real world.



Choosing what hair style and hair color, eye shape and ear size the customization choices seemed to be limit less. Once we decided on a particular style it would be added to our avatar. On the facial hair subsection the different style of beards , mustaches or combinations thereof were very similar to what we noted earlier in regards to style, pencil moustaches etc.... Shown below is a avatar with facial hair noted by the darkening regions around the mouth.




Another example of the facial hair color choices with a different hair style. Note the different eye style and choice of clothes. One could transform their avatar from something representative of a middle-aged person to , to elementary school student. Simply adding the facial hair imparts a connotation of more aged.



In this last picture note the typical "goatee" style with a "mussed" hair style and jacket and a "popped" color. Something I am told is in fashion these days. While we continued the process I thought about how young boys felt during my high school years. The reactions to those of us that had lots of facial hair early on were usually of a "I wish I could grow that" point of view. Most could only sport blond, near transparent hairs sticking out from their chins more akin to peach fuzz then a bona fide beard.