Residents of, or frequent visitors to, the nation's capital will be very familiar with the hipster, but it seems the phenomenon has spread to most parts of the country - with the exception, it appears, of rural New Zealand.
My own observations are that country folk have neither the time nor inclination to spend time on beard-crafting, being far too busy to indulge in such frivolity.
I'm reliably told there's also a hygiene factor at play. To confirm my suspicion, I typed the phrase 'New Zealand farmer' into a google image search and was vindicated immediately.
In fact, I was surprised to see most rural men almost entirely clean-shaven.
Sure, there's the occasional bit of stubble and fuzz to be seen, but on the whole Kiwi farmers are a beard-free bunch.
If a New Zealand farmer grows a beard it's generally a Grizzly Adams; a human gorse bush left to its own devices and void of any manicure - perfectly acceptable given he's most likely retired from the profession.
For further evidence I delved into the pages of NZ Hunter magazine to see how the manliest of New Zealand men approached their shaving habits. The result? Barely a fleck of stubble to be seen at all.
Further research has turned up some interesting facts on the history of beards throughout the ages.
If you were living under the reign of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth or Peter the Great, you would have had to pay a 'Beard Tax'.
It proved to be an excellent way of curbing the habit, but a far cry from the practices of the Ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Greeks. In a precursor to the hipster phenomenon, these civilisations dyed, oiled and even plaited gold thread into their facial hair!
In India, one form of punishment was to cut a man's beard off, something the courts should consider in modern day New Zealand should a hipster ever find himself falling foul of the law.
Knights of the Middle Ages were typically bearded, as were the European nobility of the mid-19th century and a raft of post-Civil War US presidents.
The two World Wars put a stop to all that, as one could simply not properly wear a gas mask while sporting a great mop of facial hair.
However, the godfathers of the hipster movement, the Beatniks of the 1950s, put paid to all that. They crafted wispy little numbers and by the following decade the hippie movement had adopted the practice and taken it to new heights.
As the history.co.uk website tells us, at the turn of the century beards were the domain of "biker dudes, mountain men and the religiously inclined".
That should have been enough to ward off the return of the beard, but as we know, what goes around, comes around.
Today, some men are in very real danger of spending more time grooming themselves than do the fairer sex, due in no small part to the time they're spending on their beards.
The great state of Texas has recognised this and, as you'd expect, has run roughshod over any beatnik beard rights; despite a Supreme Court ruling in 2014 protecting a prisoner's right to grow a beard, jails in the Lone Star State have refused to extend beard privileges to inmates with a history of escape attempts, and for good reason.
A clean-shaven prisoner would have to go to the trouble of finding a disguise when on the run, whereas a bearded man would simply have to shave to become instantly unrecognisable.
There's historical evidence to back this up: apparently Napoleon's nephew, Louis-Napoleon, was once able to escape a French prison simply by walking like a tradesman and having a shave - that should be a lesson to you all.
But as always, the real truth of things lies in advertisements from the 1960s.
In an effort to boost flagging sales due to the laziness of the beatniks, the razor industry came up with a cunning plan to get men shaving again, stating, "bearded men are often dangerous, independent to a fault and prone to stay out all night without revealing incriminating evidence around the jawline". Actually, on second thought ...
