Facial Fur · 12:17am Jun 11th, 2013
I bear the curse of being able to grow fantastic facial hair, in a place and time where clean-shaven is the norm. Seriously, I can rock a mustache like nobody's business. Still, I must regretfully shave it all off regularly, the fruits of my follicles swirling down the drain like so much toothpaste.
It was during one such hair-culling that I struck upon a dilemma most troublesome. How do ponies shave? I mean, look at this guy:
Rarity's dad has some serious facial hair going on there. Then there's Ace, from "Call of the Cutie":
Clearly, we're looking at only the most masculine of men. Er, stallions.
So, if ponies can grow facial hair, how can any of them be clean-shaven? There's fur underneath and around that area. Shaving away a beard would mean leaving naked, pink skin underneath, which no stallion has thus far shown. After devoting some serious thought to this problem, I have come up with a few possibilities.
1: Very few stallions can actually grow facial hair. It's not as though real-life horses have anything akin to our human beards, after all. This option does mean that any stallion who can grow a mustache must do so, and those that can't are stuck.
2: All mustaches/beards seen in the show are fake.
Exhibit A
3: Facial hair is color-matched to a pony's fur until it grows out longer. This isn't completely out of the realm of possibility; human facial hair tends to change color over its length, due to weathering and sun exposure. It's a bit less drastic a difference than, say, Magnum's brown-on-white contrast, of course. In this situation, all a stallion has to do is trim that area down to get the clean-shaven appearance.
4: Facial hair has to be trimmed and dyed to match a pony's fur. If this is the case, Ponyville's cosmetics industry must be booming.
Personally, I'm leaning towards a blend of 1 and 3, but it's pretty open to interpretation. If you have an idea, leave it in the comments below.
Perhaps 1, 3 and 4?