While up at the Toronto Film Festival, due to popular demand, I decided to regrow my beard. And, for the first week or two, it looked great. Then, increasingly, people began to mistake me for a member of a lost polar expedition. It was at that point I remembered exactly why I had previously purchased a beard trimmer.

So, diving through the depths of my medicine cabinet, I brought forth the trusty Remington Precision MB-30. Clicking the dial to #5 (the setting I had always used), I shore away.

Sure, it looked immensely better than it had moments before. But the next morning, while brushing my teeth in front of the mirror, it occurred to me that I could perhaps even trim down more closely, for a scruffily indie hip sort of look. Whipping out the Remington again, I clicked to setting four and buzzed.

The results were an immense improvement, and, emboldened by that success, I began to contemplate going all the way to setting three.

Of course, beard trimming is a dicey business. Just one perilous step too far and you take on the perpetually five o’clock shadowed look so favored by fragrance and hair product models. So it was with great trepidation that I clicked that one further setting, and took a first trimming pass.

I am exceedingly relieved to say that setting three turned out to be at least as good as setting four, and possibly even better. The resulting look says, without a doubt, “I am an effortlessly cool indie hipster.” Or, more accurately “I am as much of an effortlessly cool indie hipster as I can be, considering I don’t live in Williamsburg, don’t own a trucker hat, and am actually still pretty much just a neurotic little quasi-yuppie Ivy League tech dork.”

Still, I’ll take what I can get.