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I was first introduced to Sarena Hackenmiller through her blog, hairymaine.blogspot.com. My friend Dan MacLeod sent me the link, alerting me that another “beard reporter” was on the beat in Portland.
With Hairy Maine, Hackenmiller chronicled the best in facial hair in and around Portland while she attended USM for the fall 2009 semester. But this blog queen is more than just a beard reporter. She’s a tried-and-true pogonophile — a lover of beards.
Psychologists at Northumbria University in Newcastle, U.K., conducted a study in which women rated men. In the end, the results showed that women preferred men with stubble as romantic partners, either for a casual fling or a serious relationship.
Hackenmiller — who has returned to the University of Alaska at Anchorage and started a new blog, AKmoostache.tumblr.com — said she can’t pinpoint exactly when she realized she loves beards more than most, but she went public around two years ago.
“I just started telling people, ‘God, I love your beard,’” she said. “I was proud to be able to tell people I appreciated their beards.”
Though she doesn’t love all hairy faces (she detests a poorly-grown mustache), Hackenmiller readily admits her weakness for men who embrace the inevitable growth of all things beard, and would encourage any man she meets to give their facial hair a shot.
“If it looks gross, persevere,” she said. “Perseverance is key. I’ve learned through interviews that it’s really hard to start one off. It’s frustrating at first. It’s like training. I hear the first two weeks are always bad, and then you get the glorious, luscious beard.”
As many men know, not all women love beards. Hackenmiller said most of the women she knows don’t like beards; they think facial hair is gross, or they can’t get over the initial scratchiness of a man’s stubble.
But women who will love your beard as much as you do are out there, she said. She recounted standing outside the bar Empire in Portland, smoking and chatting with the people outside. She met a woman named Claire, who had recently returned from Scotland and was telling stories of her five years in Europe. Suddenly, she commented that men in Scotland had the best mustaches she’d ever seen.
“Sometimes I meet that rare girl that’s outgoing and loves mustaches and beards as much as I do,” Hackenmiller said. “I’ll never forget Claire for that.”
Hackenmiller’s affinity for beards takes many forms: She throws mustache parties. She invents new words to add to her facial hair lexicon (an “a-beard-inable snowman” is a man with snow in his beard. A woman who can’t see past a man’s facial hair is wearing “beard goggles”). She learns weird beard facts, like how the French words for both beards and mustaches are feminine. She attends the World Beard and Mustache Championship in Anchorage. And of course, she writes on her blog.
It would be easy to write off Hackenmiller’s pogonophilia as a passing phase or even a joke. But she said it’s more than that.
“Beards are something that withstands time and culture. They’re part of the body. They’ve been there forever,” she said. “You have the opportunity to appreciate it or not, but it’s there not matter what you say. Facial hair is there, and it’s beautiful.”
