Get Shaved!

With a heat wave approaching, the hipster beard’s days are numbered:

On the streets of the city’s hipster-heavy neighborhoods, trends usually have a shelf life similar to that of sushi. But one fad has lingered for months. That would be the beard, which began sprouting on the faces of many an indie rocker and indie rock fan toward the end of last year. The trend reached a tipping point in the spring, at which time Urbandictionary.com defined a “Riker” (named for a character on “Star Trek”) as “a Williamsburg or Lower East Side hipster with a beard.”

Now the hipster beard is experiencing its first summer, and thus the first hot and sweaty challenge to its survival. As a sticky July is poised to give way to a scorching August, the elements may separate the truly committed from the simply trendy.

Matt Westfall, 27, the chief executive officer of Adbattles, an Internet advertising firm, may fall into the second category. “I’m going to a wedding this weekend, and then I’ll probably shave it,” Mr. Westfall said the other day as he strolled along Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side with two similarly bearded friends.

Then he reconsidered. “Actually, what I’ll probably do,” he said, “is shave everything and grow a Fu Manchu.”

Other newly bearded New Yorkers had devised other coping strategies. “I’m going to keep mine, but keep it thin,” said Corby Hawks, a 29-year-old freelance writer and an associate publicist at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “At night, with no A.C., it gets itchy.”

Bjorn Brandt, also 27, who describes himself as an aspiring pianist, has worn a close-cropped beard for years and has no plans to change. “My girlfriend loves it,” said Mr. Brandt, touching on perhaps the biggest reason the trend remains alive.

That sentiment was echoed two blocks down Ludlow at the upstairs bar of Pianos, a hipster haunt at where five of five males in attendance possessed beards, of varying lengths.

Nate Campany, a singer-songwriter who was preparing to perform a set, was wearing something he referred to as his “summer beard.” It was short and well tended, and is to be replaced in the colder months by a billowy dark mass that he described as his Civil War beard.