Las Vegan documents year of beard growth with time-lapse selfie video

Resolutions are notoriously hard to maintain, whether they are begun on the first day of a new year or on any other day. Fad diets fail, home projects fall by the wayside.

But Justin Basl may have succeeded at his because of the lack of effort it required: For a full year, he did not shave a single hair on his face.

From May 2014 to May 2015, the Las Vegas resident let it grow. And, appropriately enough in the social media era, he took a selfie and posted a short video on his YouTube channel, Growing a Beard for a Year, every day for 365 days to document his progress. When the year was over, he compiled the selfies into a YouTube video that has nearly 80,000 views.

He intended to donate his facial hair to Locks of Love, a charity that makes wigs for children who’ve lost their hair because of medical conditions.

“I thought it would be cool. I never even read that they don’t accept beard hair until finding out like half way through growing my beard, around six months,” said Basl, a 31-year-old Bay Area native.

The organization doesn’t accept facial hair because of its coarse texture, and beard wigs are not in high demand either.

Even after learning that his facial hair would have to go in the trash rather than to a good cause, Basl didn’t end the project. Beard growing is something of a hobby for him; he’d grown his beard for four months in 2012, then shaved it on camera to Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” and posted the video on YouTube.

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“After doing that, I thought, ‘I’m just going to go a little bit longer this time,’” said Basl, who is an on-call medical transporter, although he makes cartoons in his free time and hopes to one day open his own media production company.

He moved from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in early 2015 and decided he’d shave the beard when he hit the one-year mark. Now, he keeps his beard much more closely trimmed.

The hirsute pursuit earned him a blurb in the latest Ripley’s Believe It or Not! book, “Unlock the Weird,” alongside an extreme sleepwalker and Chinese woman who underwent plastic surgery to look like North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

“A Believe It or Not like Justin Basl’s is certainly a feat, requiring unbelievable commitment,” Ripley’s lead researcher Sabrina Sieck said. “A BION can really be anything, though — from a piece of unusual art, to an obscure tradition, even a body oddity. What relates them all is that every BION is incredibly hard to believe, but undeniably true.”

People often asked Basl for tips on how to grow such a robust beard. He attributes his beard-growing abilities to genetics, but says a nutritious diet helps.

Basl hasn’t grown his beard to the same lengths since, although he has plans to eventually let it flourish, unhindered, for two or three years. Then, he’d like to enter beard-growing competitions in the U.S. and abroad.

“I just want to do that, just so I can go into those competitions and see what it’s like,” Basl said.

Contact Sarah Corsa at scorsa@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0353. Find @sarahcorsa on Twitter.