With Movember moving in fast, male students of all grades and sizes are putting down the razors.Nick Ribolla ’16, who prefers to keep his chin, soul-patch and mustache intact in a combo he dubs the “royale” grows out his facial hair because it is a “rite of passage” meant to be achieved.

“It’s the first step into being a fully bearded, bear punching, log- cabin building man,” Ribolla said.

In fact, Nick Moro ’15 felt the masculinity almost instantaneously after growing out his facial hair.

“It gives me a strange craving to chop down trees and build boats by hand,” Moro joked.

According to WebMD, facial hair growth normally coincides directly with the transition from boy-to-manhood. As the website states, the average adolescent boy will start to grow facial hair between the ages of 15 and 16. On the other side of the spectrum, however, fully-bearded boy-wonders like Vignesh Namasivayam ’16, who has been growing his facial hair out since the seventh grade, believes it is not necessarily a “rite of passage,” especially for boys at this age.

“[There are] a lot of people who don’t have the ability yet, so it’s not really a rite of passage. I think there are other things that could be considered a rite of passage over facial hair,” Namasivayam said.

In addition, with a furry friend in the facial region, some students believe the attention works out well. While Namasivayam claims that his full black beard has garnered near-unanimous praise, Moro was more hesitant to assume his stubble had such rave reviews.