Prince William made headlines yesterday after speaking to reporters in South Africa about the Princess of Wales’s cancer journey, his own personal struggles over the past year, and that oh-so-divisive facial hair.
Addressing journalists on his final day in South Africa, where the Prince of Wales has been staying for the Earthshot Prize, the annual global environmental award that recognises winners for their contributions towards environmentalism, William said the past year has been “brutal”.
"It's been dreadful. It's probably been the hardest year in my life. So, trying to get through everything else and keep everything on track has been really difficult," he told reporters.
The Prince also injected some humour into his interviews when he was asked about his new facial hair — a controversial beard he has been sporting since August.
“Well Charlotte didn’t like it the first time,” he revealed. “I got floods of tears, so I had to shave it off. And then I grew it back. I thought, hang on a second, and I convinced her it was going to be okay.”
As easy breezy as that sounds, other sources have alleged that keeping a beard is a pretty big deal for Prince William. And by other sources, I mean: Prince Harry.
In Harry’s book Spare, he claims that his decision to keep a beard for his wedding day angered Prince William beyond belief. It was all down to protocol, apparently, as tends to be the case with Prince William and Harry’s fights.
Let’s take it back to 2018. Prince Harry was all set to wear military garb for his wedding to Meghan Markle, just as William had. But according to military dress codes, that requires a shaved face.
When Harry asked the late Queen Elizabeth II if he could make an exception to military appearance codes and keep his beard, as a sort of “comfort blanket”, for the big day, she surprisingly acquiesced.
According to Spare, this enraged William. “You put her in an uncomfortable position, Harold! She had no choice but to say yes,” the then-Duke of Cambridge is alleged to have said.
This was, Harry thinks, due to him being the “spare” and William being the “heir”. “‘Willy always thought granny had a soft spot for me,” he wrote in the memoir, “that she indulged me while holding him to an impossibly high standard. Because...Heir, Spare, etc. It irked him.”
This was made all the worse because of the history of William’s facial hair efforts. The young Prince had actually grown a beard in 2008, but was ordered to shave it off when he first started military service.
By 2009, William was clean shaven again for his time in the RAF, and he stayed that way ever since — until 2024, of course.
“I’m telling you, shave it off,” William apparently told his brother in 2018. “’For the love of God, Willy,’ Harry asked, ‘why does this matter so much to you?’”
“’Because I wasn’t allowed to keep my beard,’” Prince William says in the pages of Spare.
It’s because of this background that the Prince of Wales’s 2024 beard carries so much weight. It’s bigger than just a beard, it’s a mark of longstanding beef between two brothers and the inflexibility of The Firm.
Or perhaps it’s even a sign that William has learned to relax a little. Either way, we’re happy to see the royals tentatively branching out with their aesthetics. Maybe this will pave the way for Charlotte to have tattoos.
