A SELFLESS man from Drumchapel has raised more than £1,600 for a foodbank by putting the fate of his facial hair in the hands of the public.

Jamie Mckenzie, 35, has been raising money for the Drumchapel foodbank for a number of years but decided to do something a bit different this Christmas.

The father-of-two decided to give his friends and family the chance to vote to shave or save his four-year-old beard.

Jamie said: “The girls in the foodbank had said that there’s always a lot of donations in the run up to Christmas but afterwards, when everyone’s skint, donations get hit as well.

“So now we’re looking to get funds in for the new year.

“It just so happens that my beard’s birthday was coming up. I was planning on having it for a year but it’s been four years and my wife absolutely hates it so I decided to start two JustGiving pages to ‘Save the Beard’ and ‘Shave the Beard.

“My wife was promoting the shave it page along with my clients because they know I love my beard and they wanted to punish me for killing them at training.”

Voting was set to close on December 23 but due to phenomenal demand, the page was reopened until Christmas Eve.

Jamie added: “I said to everyone we were going to close the vote at 6pm and then right on the dot someone emailed from the save side saying they still wanted to donate.

“Then I had a couple of people messaging saying they wanted to double the money they had put in. It was too much to say no.

“The guy who donated £200 to the save page was only doing it to annoy my wife but it got everyone excited and donating more.”

After a tense showdown, the shave it page was the overall winner, with a total of £853 donated.

The martial arts instructor previously set-up a campaign to help the foodbank with donations of feminine hygiene products.

For every product donated, Jamie offered to do one push up.

“My clients wanted to see me suffer so they brought in more and more. I ended up doing just over 5000 push ups”, he explained.