After Justin Marshall lost his oil industry job in March 2015, he decided to grow out his beard. “I wanted to see how long I could get it just because why not?” the 30-year-old tells Us Weekly.
But when Justin landed an interview in July, his wife, Kirsten, gently suggested he lose the facial fuzz. “I got a haircut and a fresh shave,” says the dad of 9-month-old Claire. While Kirsten was glad to say bye-bye to the bristles, Claire was less than thrilled with Justin’s smooth look. Watch her adorable reaction in the video above!
The San Antonio, Texas–based parents captured their daughter’s reaction to his freshly shaved face. In the video that was filmed in July and has since gone viral with more than 69,000 views to date. In the clip, a then-7-month-old Claire is seen on her furry-faced father’s lap, gleefully playing peekaboo. But when they play the same game after Justin shaved off his beard, the confused infant bursts into tears, unable to recognize her dad.
“I was so sad!” Kirsten, 28, tells Us. “Claire wouldn’t even look at him. I had to hold her after to calm her down.”
“It was heartbreaking because you don’t want to have your kid feel bad,” Justin says. “But she’s supersmart, so she picked up real quick and realized that it was me.”
Just as surprising as Claire’s reaction: the fact that the footage went viral. “Because Claire is our first kid, we’ve been trying to record as much as we can and kind of capture moments of her growing up,” Justin tells Us. “I was expecting just to put it on YouTube to let our family see and it ended up getting 50,000 hits in a month. It just got crazy.”
