Gordon Cramer, responding to a comment about beards I left back in June on his Tamam Shud site, replied:-
“[...] I do wonder about the clean shaven image of him that was published originally, given his supposed movements he would have been without a shave for 18 hours or more before his departure yet no 5 o’clock shadow or stubble..”
The Somerton Man checked his suitcase (containing a razor and razor strop) into Adelaide Railway Station cloak room between 11.00am and noon (and he then bought a bus ticket sometime after 11:15am), while his time of death was estimated next morning as probably having been about 2am that same night: so to be precise, it seems likely that he wouldn’t have shaved for at least 15 hours.
All the same I do agree that Gordon has a point here: the Somerton Man’s perfectly clean-shaven appearance in the police photos doesn’t really square with the generally accepted timeline – 15 hours is too long to not get some kind of “5 o’clock shadow”.
Just to remind you, here’s what he looked like (once Jimmy Durham had managed to wrestle a shirt and tie onto the body):-
Timing discrepancies like this are problematic for all Tamam Shud theories, because they’re not really a matter of opinion: facial hair is controlled by physical rules, which aren’t normally bypassed. So what could explain the Somerton Man’s apparent clean-shaven-ness?
Never having grown a beard myself, I was surprised today to find out that facial hair doesn’t ‘just grow’ (i.e. continuously and mechanically): rather, it follows a set of growth rules. In a page on beard length in a beard-products-selling website, I discovered that human hair has three distinct phases: anagen, catagen, and telogen.
The anagen phase (for head hair) lasts anywhere from two to six years, and since this is the growth phase, we can say with confidence that no man’s beard can ever grow longer than it is at six years old. Now, a man’s genetics determines how long his beard’s growth phase is. [...]
During the second phase (catagen), your hair stops growing. It embeds in your skin, and sort of sits there for a few months. During the final phase (telogen), a new hair starts growing in the follicle and pushes out the old hair, causing you to shed it.
The upshot for the Somerton Man, I think, is that if his facial hair didn’t obviously grow during the last 15+ hours of his life (and don’t take my word for it, click through above to the high-res images for yourself), it seems most likely to me that his facial hair – i.e. moustache and beard – wasn’t in the anagen (growth) phase, but was instead in the later catagen or telogen phases. That is, I believe this supports the idea that he had recently shaved off a long-standing (or do I mean “long-hanging”?) and therefore possibly quite substantial moustache and beard. (Hence the question: might one of the two combs in his suitcase have actually been a beard comb?)
Of course, the major alternatives to this scenario are (a) that he shaved again later in the day (problem: his razor was still in the suitcase), (b) someone else shaved him while alive (but in Glenelg?), or (c) someone else shaved him just after he had died (possible, but this does seem just a little bit unlikely – a dead guy is a dead guy, right?).
Personally, I’m running with the whole “luxurious beard” theory, but feel free to disagree. 
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