

Ladies and gentlemen, it is the end of an era. The end of a three year long journey, and we’re filled with sadness and regret that it’s ended.

Roughly a month ago, in “one of the largest” campaigns he’s ever been a part of, Harley Morenstein has shaved off his epic beard. We spoke with him yesterday about the decision to end his three-year long relationship with his locks of love.

So, you have shaved off your beard?

Yes, my beard, I shaved it off at the beginning of the month. Part of the deal was I had to have a media blackout on my face until basically today. You know there was a couple of opportunities I had to turn down because they would have been released in that period. I’ve been doing Twitch a lot lately,and I haven’t been able to do use my face camera. I had banked up my Instagram photos, but Snapchat, I couldn’t really engage with my followers.When Periscope and all of those came out, I couldn’t really hop on and livestream. Live things were pretty much out of the question. It’s just been weird to not post my face for the last 18 days, and for my face to… I want to say hairless, but it’s almost three weeks later so I have basically a face of hair again.

Oh, so you have like peach fuzz?

No, basically when you shave it, it’s peach fuzz. Well, minutes later it’s stubble but then in about an hour later I pretty much have a beard, by most people’s standards

So, you do clearly have a Wolverine-esque beard growth power

Yeah, it’s pretty fast.

Can you tell us why you shaved off your beard?

Yeah! Well, there’s a lot of things. First and foremost, to myself, I initially grew a beard almost out of laziness. I just didn’t shave, and I thought I looked pretty cool with it. That kind of happened around the same time that there was this beard movement, and I put out a Vine at the time of “How to Shave Your Beard like a Man, You Don’t Shave Your Beard”…

…And that, that I saw get shared, like a million thumbs up on Facebook, and it went around. I basically found myself unintentionally as the spearhead of this beard movement. It was fun, it was cool, I loved my beard. I do. I mean I have a beard again right now. It’s just, as time went on, the beard became my identity first and foremost. I went from being bacon guy to bacon beard guy, and a lot of people starting making beards happen. You know, growing out their beards and beards were at the time “oh you look like a hobo,” now people are like “you look like a cool hobo,” cause beards are cool.

Personally I like to zig when people zag and a lot of people have been zagging, it’s nice to zig.

But that just wouldn’t be enough. I kind of wrestled with that internally for a couple of months before shaving. I have a friend of mine, who’s a director, and he had brought up the potential of me doing a role, and mentioned that I would have to part with the beard if I wanted to do the role.

I really badly wanted to do the role and I can’t really get into many details about it because it’s not my project, it’s someone else’s project but I would have had to lose the beard as well for that, so it gave me a kind of push. I kind of put out on the radar if there was a kind of cool way I could shave my beard, maybe if there was something cool that I could do, and that’s where Schick came in.

Tell us about that.

I made a huge collaboration with Schick, outside of our year long relationships with Epic Meal Time, this is the biggest thing I’ve ever done. I remember when I was growing the beard, the thought of “would I ever shave it off, is there an opportunity out there” and Schick came in with this huge campaign. They’re working with a couple of other YouTubers as well, so I hopped on to it.

I put up a video, there’s a whole bunch of Vines coming all about my beard.

Do you still have the beard?

I do have my beard hair. I grew out a beard a couple of years ago before I grew this last beard, and when I shaved it off, I kept it in a ziplock bag. I still have that beard, and I also have recently shaved off beard as well. I don’t know what I might do with it, maybe I’ll make paint brushes out of the hair and do some beard painting. I’m not sure what the future of the beard will be, but I do still have it.

Are there any other reasons as to why you chose to go beardless?

Lastly why I made up my mind to shave was I have a very beautiful face.

And the world should see it!

A lot of people will be like “From this day, the world has lost a magnificent beard, but also on this day the world has gained a beautiful face.”

Indeed it has Harley, indeed it has. RIP Beard, we will miss you, and we welcome Harley’s beautiful face:

For those of you who were wondering, the beard was 6½ inches before it met its end.