No, I haven't changed my mind about facial hair but here's something that may explain it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/fashion/thursdaystyles/23BEARDS.html?8hpib

and if the article goes into Times Select, here's the highlights.

"It's a sign of the times," said Mr Martin, the advertising director for Vice, a lad magazine based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "People are into beards right now."

This is some sort of reaction to men who look scrubbed, shaved, plucked and waxed," said the designer Bryan Bradley, who stepped onto the runway after his Tuleh presentation looking like a renegade from the John Bartlett show, at which more than half the models wore beards: untidy ones that scaled a spectrum from wiry to ratty to shabby to fully bushy.
"It's less 'little boy,' " Mr Bradley said. "For a while men have looked too much like Boy Scouts going off to day camp."

Yet the return of the wild beard carries a certain erotic charge that has been missing from beards since the Furry Freak look of the 1970's, or at least those who grow them hope they do.

"You know, it's funny," said Lola Phonpadith, a public relations manager for the fashion company BCBG. "I've been talking about this with my friends for weeks. I'm kind of into guys with beards today, and I'm embarrassed to say that. But the pretty-boy look can only last for so long."

Aargh.