Yeah, I remember a conversation with a girl once who was all like, "So, now you've got a beard, you don't need to spend as much time in the bathroom in the morning, because you don't need to shave anymore, right?"
(If anything, my experiences have shown me that beard maintenance is even more time consuming than simply shaving every morning. Because beard hair just grows everywhere, so if you don't wanna look like Grizzly, then you're still gonna need to spend a lot of time grooming and trimming the beard. Even when you've got a beard, you've still got to deal with five o'clock shadow on the bits of your face that aren't bearded.)
Riker kept quite a carefully styled beard. The longest he ever had it (aside from that one time in a Borg-infested alternative universe
) was in season two's "The Child", the first episode in which he is bearded, where he had quite an extensive neck beard also (this was trimmed down in the following episodes). I've found it does take a bit of effort to have a Riker-style beard, because it means having to basically shave the cheeks right down, as well as the neckline beneath, while keeping as much as possible in-between.
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