Is the "smoothie" era ovah?

My friends know I am not a fan of the smoothie look. It's when men wax all their body hair off. Unless you are on the Men's Olympic swim team, there is no reason for this crime against nature. I'm all for taming a uni-brow but that no-hair-on-chest thing? Enough.

Maybe today's NYTs is making too much of it but I'm very excited about the news. Although most women do not like beards believe me, most of us are glad to see the return of a less artificial look. Of course this has not impacted Los Angeles yet, the home of the metrosexual.

From today's NYTs style section:

"This is some sort of reaction to men who look scrubbed, shaved, plucked and waxed," said the designer Bryan Bradley, who stepped onto the runway after his Tuleh presentation looking like a renegade from the John Bartlett show, at which more than half the models wore beards: untidy ones that scaled a spectrum from wiry to ratty to shabby to fully bushy.

"It's less 'little boy,' " Mr. Bradley said. "For a while men have looked too much like Boy Scouts going off to day camp."

On city streets, too, trends in scruff have reached new levels of unruliness, a backlash, some beard enthusiasts say, against the heightened grooming expectations that were unleashed with the rise of metrosexuality as a cultural trend. Men both straight and gay, it appears, want to feel rough and manly.