Seven o'clock shadow?

THAT scruffy look -- too whiskery to be just five-o'clock shadow, but not quite a beard, either. Yasser Arafat has had it for years, but it has taken Don Johnson of ``Miami Vice'' and his followers to make it high fashion. For various reasons, including -- let us be frank -- tender cheeks not yet hardened to regular scraping with a razor, many of Hollywood's young hunks have been cultivating the fuzzy look.

How do these guys manage to look so consistently scruffy? If they shave every other day, there have to be three or four mornings a week when their jawlines look more like Cary Grant than Bob Dylan, right?

But now we see that an outfit in Culver City, Calif., is advertising a ``stubble device.'' It adjusts to various settings to allow the user to give the impression of one to five days' growth. (For the latter, one presumably has to have at least five days' growth to start with.)

How this device differs from an ordinary electric shaver that simply doesn't work very well is not clear. But this planned scruffiness is not without precedent. Wrinkles (in clothing, that is) made a comeback a few years ago as the sign of all-natural fibers. And think of all those gentrifiers chipping away, exposing all that Victorian brick their forebears covered up with horsehair plaster.