What do George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Joseph Calleja, Luke Dimech and Xandru Grech have in common?

Not the acting, not the voice, not the football or the fitness skills. It’s the facial hair. They all, at one point or other, followed the continental hairy trend, where men trade bare faces for full beards. The fondness for full beards on the international scene started about four years ago, but in Malta it picked up about a year ago.

According to barber Antonio Camilleri, 44, “the manly man look” is now all the rage. He sports a colonel moustache himself, the tips of which he keeps nice and twirly with a touch of wax.

A barber is where you go for a ‘manly’ straightforward haircut, where you can have a hot towel shave with an old-fashioned style blade

Beards are more popular with the younger generation these days, he says.

“Once one of my 20-something clients starts growing a beard, friends follow suit,” he adds.

Gone are designer stubbles or paintbrush-shaped sideburns: we are talking about the sort of bushy beard that takes weeks rather than days to grow. The style can vary from plain old full beard to chin curtain.

Mr Camilleri believes one of the reasons for the comeback of the beard could be economical.

“Blades are rather costly: a packet costs some €16 and will last you four or five shaves, so if you shave every day, it tots up,” he says.

Men who grow a beard certainly do not do so out of laziness.

“Beards need maintenance and that is more time-consuming than shaving. For example, you need to wash it with a conditioner twice a week,” he points out. Beards also have to be trimmed regularly, otherwise their owners will wake up looking very much like Father Christmas.

Mr Camilleri has opened his shop in Birkirkara at a time when the art of barbering in Malta is dying and when many elderly barbers are closing shop. “But I believe a barber is an important part of the community. And, if people don’t come to you, you go to them,” he adds, saying that, with social media today, outreach is very easy.

He used to be a restaurateur but packed up everything 16 years ago to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, who was a barber at the dockyard. He describes barbering as an art and, in fact, he went to Leicester to study and even opened a shop there for a while.

“A barber is where you go for a ‘manly’ straightforward haircut, where you can have a hot towel shave with an old-fashioned style blade,” he says.

He insists it is also the place where you discuss sports, cars, football and whisky. “You can come here to talk man stuff,” he says, describing a barbershop as a brotherhood community.

“In the past, fathers used to bring their sons to the barber, so it used to be quality time. These days, mothers take them to the hairdresser.”

A barber, as opposed to a hairdresser, can give you beard pampering with no razor rashes, residual stubble, razor burns, cuts and nicks.

A session takes about 30 to 40 minutes and will set a man back some €8.

Does he think this wild look will spell an end to the metrosexual man? The one who waxes his chest and leg hair and trims his eyebrows into a perfect arch?

“Well, men are vainer these days, but I think we’re increasingly moving towards rugged manliness. Look around you: it’s all about tattoos and beards,” he says.

A sign on the wall says it all: ‘Shaving and grooming, the ultimate experience for real men.’

Beardy facts:

• The ancient Greeks regarded beards as a sign of virility.

• The Victorian obsession with air quality saw the beard promoted as a sort of filter. A thick beard, it was reasoned, would capture the impurities before they could get inside the body. Others saw it as a means of relaxing the throat, especially for those whose work involved public speaking. Some doctors even recommended that men grew beards to avoid sore throats.

• During the latter part of the 19th century, Europeans saw facial hair as a symbol of solid, middle-class respectability.

• In the 1950s, non-conformists adopted beards as a symbol of rebellion.

• The 1960s hippie counter-culture also embraced the full beard, but over the subsequent decades it largely disappeared until the emergence of the designer stubble look of the 1990s.