Meet the 23-year-old with a beard that'd make any hipster jealous.

“This is who I am. I’m different. And I’ve learned to accept it. Fully.”

Meet Hanaam Kaur. She’s a 23 years old, a teacher’s assistant, a Sikh and she lives in the UK.

Oh yeah, and she has a beard:

Hanaam has PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) which causes her excessive hair growth. She noticed that hair began to grow on her face and chest when she was about 11-years-old:

Initially, she tried everything she could to get rid of the hair. She would wax it, pluck it and shave it, but nothing she did could fully hide it. She began getting horrifically bullied in school and even found herself receiving death threats. Things got so bad for Hanaam, she began self harming and considered suicide.

“It got so bad that I just didn’t want to live anymore,” she says.

But all that changed when she turned 16 and decided to be baptised as a Sikh, a religion where it is forbidden to cut body hair. “We need to keep our bodies intact,” she says. “The way it was given by god.”

From that point on, Hanaam decided to embrace her facial hair. She let her beard grow out fully and even started making YouTube videos in an attempt to reach to other women with the same condition.

Her parents were initially reluctant to accept her decision, as they were worried about the affect it would have on her life. But Hanaam has no regrets: “I would never ever go back now and remove my facial hair because it’s the way God made me and I’m happy with the way I am.”

And it helps that she has a total gem of an 18-year-old little brother, who says “As long as she’s happy that’s all I really care about.”

For most women, the idea of facing the world with a beard is too difficult to even comprehend. But Hanaam rocks it like it’s nobody’s business. “I feel more feminine, more sexy and I think I look it too,” she says. “I’ve learned to love myself for who I am nothing can shake me now.”

She’s proud of who she is, and for that, we should be proud of her. It’s bloody difficult for women to reach a place of self-love in an age of warped standards of perfection. That Hanaam has managed to get there puts her miles ahead of most if us.

What an amazing woman.

Watch her story (via Barcroft Media) here:

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