“Your beard looks so amazing,” one of the ladies at our table cooed.

I flushed a little under my whiskers. “Thank y…”

“It sparkles.” She turned to her companion. “Doesn’t it sparkle?”

The second lady leaned in, chewed her lip, and nodded. “Yes. Yes, it does.” She winked. “You have a sparkly beard.”

I smoothed my snow-white whiskers and blurted out the first ridiculous thing that came to mind: “I comb unicorn dust through it every morning.”

“Really?” They both beamed.

“Of course not.” I pointed at the ceiling. “We’re sitting under a chandelier. The ‘sparkles’ are light reflected through the cut glass.”

The first lady shook her head. “Nope. You combed glitter through the hairs of your chinny-chin-chin.”

The second lady nodded. “Your sparkles look wonderful. Whatever product you’re using, keep doing it.”

Is it possible that glittery beards on geezers drive women of a certain age wild?

“But I’m not glamming. It’s light reflecting on my white beard, like on a movie screen.”

I looked to my wife for backup, but Terry was in one of her moods. Her whole body quivered with the effort to hold in howls of laughter.

The first woman touched a finger to her lips. “It’s OK. Your secret’s safe with us.”

“Sure,” the second lady said. “But the glitter makes you look like a super sexy Santa.”

“I don’t glitter glam my beard with bows, nor beads and especially not sparkles.” I pounded the table, which drove all three ladies into hysterics. “I do tend to keep a few stray cookie crumbs in there in case I get hungry at 3 a.m. But no glitter.”

One of the ladies snorted, “You could weave bulbs through your face fuzz for Christmas.”

“Or sparkle lights for the Fourth of July,” the other chortled. “But not real sparklers. You wouldn’t want to start a brush fire.”

My wife wanted in on the act: “You know those construction paper turkeys the kids make at school for Thanksgiving…”

“No! We don’t deck the bristles with bursts of beard embellishments.” I stood. “We’re going home.”

“But the meal hasn’t been served yet.”

“There’s half a cupcake stashed in my whiskers. Snag that. I’ve lost my appetite.”

It turns out that glitter beards are an actual thing, a fashion statement. No, no, no. Beards bursting with color sound like tricks we 4-H kids pulled on each other overnight in the cow barns during the county fair. The first kid who fell asleep got pranked. But very few of us at ages 10 or 12 sported beards. We had to draw them on the early snoozers.

Even then, we didn’t sprinkle Magic Marker beards with sparkles. There are pranks and then there’s just plain mean.

“You’re not a very jolly Santa Claus,” my wife said as she plucked a chocolate chunk from inside the bristles. “You could have just said thank you, and they would have moved on to something else as equally harmless.”

“You mean like the white streak through the back of your hair? Then they’d talk about what a beautiful skunk you’d make.”

“Let’s go home,” she said.

I sparkled at the thought.

Spread sparkles all over Burt’s beard at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com, the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook or at www.burtonwcole.com.