Our columnist this week is 16-year-old Martyn Hannah.

To me, one of life's great unfathomables is why people wear beards. I cannot see the point.

People that grow beards tend to have nothing better to do.

In the interests of fairness I decided to grow one a few months ago. Except I didn't because I'm only 16 so what I ended up with was more like the ear trimmings from my grandad stuck to my face rather than the more masculine and mature lion mane you tend to see on people who like trees a little too much.

In principle it's a very easy thing to do. Instead of waking up in the morning and removing a layer of stubble (along with a rather large amount of skin and resulting blood) you just leave it.

After a few days it starts to look a little bit like a beard. From a distance it looks like you have coloured in the bottom half of your face with an HB pencil and on a closer inspection it appears that you can't be bothered to keep up your sharp appearance.

This is as far as my beard growing got because my dad started to ask questions about my inner feelings. Every time I moved within a 3m radius of my mother she sneezed and came out in a rash, and my girlfriend had a laughing seizure whenever our faces brushed. Annoying, I'm sure you will agree.

With my part of the experiment over I started to look at people who did continue wearing their beards at staggering lengths. One such man was a car parking attendant in the Lake District. As my dad's car followed the directions he was giving us the visibility suddenly became zero as his beard covered the line of sight my dad was relying on to prevent the car coming to a rest on his toes.

Another gentleman I came across was in a caf.

He was eating his egg and cress sandwich with great enthusiasm. The occasional crumb would leave his mouth accompanied by a lot of egg and even more cress. All the food collected in his beard, sort of like a bib.

I watched with great interest and suspense as to what he would do once he had finished eating.

Would he pick the food out and eat it, or would he simply get up and walk away? I wasn't sure which would be the polite thing to do so I just watched with great interest.

He did both. He picked out the bits he fancied having a nibble at and presumably saved the rest until later.

It's not just the hygiene issues involved. There are the styling issues too. A styling guru is something I'm not - I own corduroy, but I do know that no stylish person wears a beard.

Seriously, try to think of one. Jeremy Beadle?

Toadie from Neighbours - apparently. See what I mean?

Beards just aren't stylish. Even Forrest Gump in Castaway looked perfectly hideous dressed in his beard. It made him do crazy things like talk to a football and roam around naked. They make people end up with five fractures in their feet, moulding food fused to their faces and the most legendary man alive looking like a Barbary ape.

They serve no purpose but to totally ruin humanity and destroy faith in the male race.