They say when you have a child, everything changes. Your life isn’t yours anymore—it belongs to your new baby.

At least, that’s a harsh realization that Brooklyn beard-grower and new Dad Luke Hughett came to accept after the birth of his daughter Willa earlier this year.

“One thing in particular that nobody mentions about becoming a father,” Hughett states in the video, “is that beards and babies do not get along.”

While baby Willa is both annoyed and fascinated by Hughett’s beard, he nonetheless decides to shave it off—but with a caveat: he resolves he must find a way to preserve it forever.

“I told my creative partner Sean I was planning to shave my beard after my daughter was born,” Hughett told CBS Local San Francisco. “He jokingly asked what I was planning to do with the beard afterward and I said something like, “yeah, i should taxidermy it.'”

It was a joke, naturally, but the wheels started turning, and soon enough Hughett was fruitlessly searching for beards saved in lucite online. If he opted to take his beard preserving a step further, it appeared he would be exploring a new frontier for facial hair conservators everywhere. “People either thought the idea was “Incredible” or “Incredibly disgusting”, which I thought was funny,” he says (his wife, it would appear, would fall in the latter category).

A couple filmmaker friends at Blurry+Hinge got involved immediately and started filming as Hughett put his plan into action. Hughett managed to find someone willing and able to cast his beard in acrylic, and pretty soon, he became the first man (probably) to preserve intact facial hair in a 45 pound block of solid lucite.

You know, for posterity.

Check out the beard’s incredible journey and how baby Willa and Dad are doing these days:

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