Ricardo Grzeca is Sao Paolo’s king of disguise. One day, you’ll see him, wave, say ‘Oi ola’ as he saunters down to his office block. The next, he’ll walk straight by you, close as you like, completely undetected.
He’s a man with as many different looks as there are days in the year, who deploys his skills with the razor blade, a small arsenal of wigs and stick-on facial hair, and a capacious wardrobe, in order to shift shape in line with his ever-changing moods.
“It helps me be more creative in my everyday life,” he explains from beneath his latest face-fuzz: about two growth cycles above designer stubble. “Sometimes, I feel living in your own skin too much means clinging to your old habits. I notice how people treat me subtly differently, depending on my look, and that encourages me not to rest on my assumptions.”
The son of gauchos, brought up on ranching territory, Ricardo studied fine art in Porto Allegre, then ended up designing web user experience at a range of little internet start-ups. His daily routine was happy, in an ordinary sort of way. But Ricardo’s always had a thing for shaking things up. At one point, a few years ago, he found an apartment in the slums of Sao Paolo, because, he says, he wanted to see for himself what life was like out there.
So, on a whim one day, he decided to re-style the massive beard he’d grown at the age of 19, turning it into a neatly-clipped country gent tache. After he’d rinsed the final sheared hair from the sink, he was fascinated by how people’s responses to him instantly changed. He wasn’t ‘weirdy-beardy’ Ricardo anymore: he was ‘smart city’ Ricardo. Waiters stopped looking down their noses at him. But he wasn’t getting as many thumbs-up in the punk rock bars he liked to frequent. So out of curiosity, he decided to keep going: to cycle through all the permutations his face offered.
Nowadays, he wakes up, flops out of bed, and only then decides who it is he's going to be that day. Some days he looks a bit Mafioso in a fedora and sideburns. Other days he sports a countrified beard, or a greaser Kings Of Leon-style handlebar moustache. “The hardest is the handlebar,” he says, “Because you have to keep reapplying wax to it.” The Salvador Dali is one of the few types of tache he’s yet to tick off. And of course, the sort commonly known as the ‘Hitler tache’ is off the menu. “Man, that psychopath ruined one entire type of moustaches for everyone…”
Being so creative with his looks can, however, have a flipside. “Like, for instance, I went for a job once, and had a beard at the interview. I went back to start a few weeks later, by which time the beard was gone, and it was more than a bit awkward when I turned up all eager and no one recognised me. Later, my boss confessed: ‘To be honest, I was sort of scared of you with the beard!’. Well, it keeps me – and everyone else – on their toes.”
QUESTION: Have you noticed people treating you differently when you’ve had different facial hair?
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