Dwyane Wade Shaves Off His Beard & Lookalike Jokes Pour In

Baby-faced Dwyane Wade is back.

The three-time NBA champion took to Instagram to reveal a new look, sans the beard he’s been rocking since his early playing days.

The full beard is gone, and all that’s left is a mustache and goatee with a few grays peeking through.

He showed off his clean-shaven cheeks in a carousel of photos, including a school photo of him as a kid and a video of him turning his head from side to side in amazement.

‘‘How many years did I take off!? The beard needed a break!” reads the caption.

Clean-shaven Wade was the standard back in his early Miami days, where he wore an oversized draft suit as the fifth pick in the stacked 2003 draft and won his first championship as a fresh-faced 24-year-old with Shaquille O’Neal by his side.

But times changed, and anything from chinstraps to neatly sculpted beards was in, and he adapted to a razor-sharp lineup as he entered his Big Three era with LeBron James and Chris Bosh, yielding four straight NBA Finals appearances and two Larry O’Brien trophies.

Then, once he moved on to his hometown Chicago Bulls, partnered up with Bron again with the Cavs, and retired in Miami in 2019, his beard became fuller.

Wade’s been protective of his facial hairstyles over the years because he was a late bloomer, and once he finally had a connecting beard, he wouldn’t even let a lucrative endorsement get in the way.

“When I was young, I was getting a lot of endorsements, so Gillette came to me with an opportunity to have a deal, and what I had to do after every game, before the media, I had to be naked-faced. I had just worked hard to get my beard. I’m 25, 26; it took me forever. I’m not going to be naked-faced because I just worked very, very hard to get this beard.”

But now that Wade’s perspective has changed, he’s shaved off his beard (and a few years) in the process; see how social media is feeling about the new look below.