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Apparently, before Monday, the beard was nothing more than the hallmark of a Brooklyn hipster, a facial accoutrement that had not made an appearance in polite society since "Chester A. Arthur’s muttonchops." Well, all that changed, according to a Times trend piece yesterday, thanks to White House press secretary Jay Carney, who sported a beard at the first press conference of the year. It was during this event that Times fashion editors spit champagne all over their foie gras and declared, "Wait, this is a thing?" Of course, The Gray Lady was not about to be scooped, so they sprung into action, cataloguing the sudden appearance of facial follicles on previously clean-shaven men of stature. That’s right, the hirsute arrival of "The Bearded Man." And thus, a trend story is born.

First, of course, the Times had to reconcile the fact that facial hair had somehow managed to migrate across the East River, what to them seemed a truly Herculean feat. Brooklyn and hipsters were mentioned or alluded to no fewer than five times:

"The beard, until recently the scruffy fashion statement of the plaid-shirt-and-craft-beer creative underclass..."

"Forget biker chic or even mixologist chic."

"To the Brooklyn set, it’s an echo of that post-’60s moment when longhair migrated from the muddy fields of Woodstock to crew-cut turf like country music and the National Football League."

"Just consider how much the L-train look—until recently, about as common as lip piercings on Wall Street—has been spotted on corner-office types..."

"Was this a sign, he joked, that Mr. [Lloyd] Blankfein ’is going casual,’ that he ’is thinking of taking up organic farming and the banjo?’ "

The Times’s blustering excitement shouldn’t come as a shock, however, since they’d only just discovered this crazy place called Williamsburg—which, surprise!, is full of hipsters!—last May. And once they discovered hipsters, they were finally able to have the proper context to judge all of these crazy future organic farmers flooding the mainstream, like...Lloyd Blankfein. Yes, Blankfein showing up at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year sporting facial hair was the shark-jumping moment for the great beard revolution. Because no one in the world of big business has ever performed such a wild act of rebellion as wearing a beard—you know, except for Steve Jobs, Ben Bernanke, Larry Ellison, Richard Parsons, Disney president Edwin Catmull, Steve Wozniak, Former Richest Man in the World Carlos Slim, and, well you get the picture.

But fans of the clean-shaven man need not fear, because now that the New York Times has officially declared beards to be a trend, that trend is, by necessity, over. That’s right, it’s as over as teenagers hugging (stop laughing, that was totally a trend). See, Times trends stories are like a quantum physics paradox, where, by examining the existence of something, they cause it to no longer exist. They’re like the media obverse of Cartesian philosophy—I think, therefore I am no longer. So, rest assured, the beard is now officially done. Long live razor burn.