Five Thousand Dollars of Effortlessness

Dr. Jeffrey Epstein had been quietly doing facial hair transplants in New York for about a decade before the demand suddenly went vertical. The procedure is exactly what it sounds like: follicles taken from the back of the head, redistributed strategically across the lower face, a few months of recovery, and then a full beard where patchy misery used to live. Around five thousand dollars. His clientele—young, fashion-conscious professionals somewhere between twenty and forty—were paying to skip the wait. Which, if you’ve spent years watching your face produce something that doesn’t connect in the middle and fails completely on the sides, is a logical response to an identifiable problem. The deficit is clear. The correction is available. The price is painful but not impossible.

I’ve been watching my own face try and fail at this for as long as I can remember. The mustache and the chin do separate, incompatible things. There’s a stretch of nothing in between that no amount of patience has ever resolved. The idea of just having it fixed—the way you’d fix a structural problem anywhere else—has a horrible pragmatic logic to it. Identify the gap, pay the doctor, move on with your life. The problem is five thousand dollars is also, coincidentally, approximately the price of a coherent aesthetic identity, which is a more interesting problem than a bald patch.

The real comedy is that the entire look depends on projected nonchalance. The flannel shirt, the single-origin coffee, the well-thumbed paperback—the whole arrangement conspires to suggest a man who simply cannot be bothered. And then some of these men are scheduling outpatient surgery on their faces to maintain it. The beard that signals you don’t care is the most expensive thing they own. Whether that’s deeply human or deeply stupid I genuinely cannot decide, and most days I think it’s both at the same time, which is probably the correct answer to most questions about men.