v. To artfully trim a beard or other facial hair.
2015
Auto-topiarising your beard is difficult for the partially sighted man.
2013
William Shakespeare, without his sharply topiarised chin, its pointiness so expressive of wit and intelligence, would have had the face of a balding sheep.
2012
Poor Edgar Allan Poe. For years he groomed that personality-defining black moustache sitting like a mournful raven on his upper lip. Then along comes John Cusack in The Raven wearing a full-order goatee. Can’t Hollywood get anything right? Cusack looks too handsome, too topiarised.
1993 (earliest)
Connery, his beard topiarised to a silvery point, bonds Bondishly with Snipes — gunpowder-dry gags and plenty of oneupmanship — but they never quite spark, leaving the film's Eastern promise unfulfilled.
This noun-to-verb conversion of the word topiary — the clipping and trimming of shrubs and other plants into artful shapes (a term that dates to the late 16th century) — has been a consistent member of the gardening lexicon since at least the mid-1950s.