Project fear might be a phrase most of us associate with Brexit rather than beards, but make no mistake: there’s been a concerted effort by a coalition of ardent pognophobes to scare men off facial hair in the past few years.

I’ve been writing about beards since they became a bona fide thing around 2013 and, despite numerous attempts by style pundits, scaremongers who say beards are filthier than toilet seats, and big bucks razor brands who’ve seen the bottom drop out of the shaving market (sales were down 5.1 per cent last year), facial hair remains defiantly on-trend for 2019. A survey conducted by grooming brand The Bluebeards Revenge revealed that a third of British men have resolved to grow facial hair in 2019. The main reason was to improve their chances of finding a new partner, or impressing an existing one.

Beard styles are evolving. The full-on hipster, so often seen adjacent to a well-inked neck, is old hat, while sailor styles are slowly being replaced by neater, less bushy numbers like beardstaches (the moustache area is left longer than the rest of the beard) and the beard fade (where the fading techniques used to create a smooth transition between long and short hair are applied to the face).

You can recreate this last style yourself at home by gradually reducing the length of your beard from the cheeks up to the sideburns and hairline and adjusting the guard length on your beard trimmer. A gadget like the Philips OneBlade is great for removing stray hairs around the cheeks and adding definition around the beard boundary.