The recent beard boom may also lead to the trend's demise as women find facial hair appealing only when it's a rarity, according to the findings of a new study.
The lyrics of Justin Timberlake's song "What goes around, comes around" couldn't be truer for fashion. Of late, beards have made a comeback, so much so that apparently many New York hipsters are paying north of US$8,000 for "facial hair transplants" to embellish their patchy beards, according to a NY Post report.
Just when the trend seems to be catching on, University of New South Wales researchers are suggesting it may be time to invest in a razor. You ask why? Read on!
The popularity of beards may be making them less appealing to women. The findings of a study conducted by the university researcher found that women rated beards as most alluring when facial hair was rare, whereas clean-shaven faces gained in popularity when hairy faces were the norm.
For the study, 1,453 bisexual and heterosexual women and 213 heterosexual men were shown 36 images of men's faces. The first 24 pictures were a mixture of bearded and clean-shaven men; the last 12, however, showed varied levels of beard growth. They then ranked their attractiveness on a scale of minus four to four.
"It appears that beards gain an advantage when rare, but when they are in fashion and common, they are declared trendy and that attractiveness is over. The bigger the trend gets, the weaker the preference for beards and the tide will go out again. We may well be at peak beard," researcher Richard Brooks said in a press statement.
The study also confirms the notion that humans tend to view an individual's attractiveness based not only on his or her appearance, but also on the appearance of others.
The financial crisis of 2008 may have had a huge role to play in the recent beard boom.
"I think one of the reasons beards have made a comeback now is that it's a difficult time," Brooks told BBC News. "Young men are competing to attract someone when work is not easy to come by. So we might expect some aspects [of masculinity] to get turned up.
From muttonchops to soul patches, beards take many forms. People associate beards with age, masculinity and dominance, studies show. But the popularity of facial fuzz has waxed and waned over time. Sideburns peaked in popularity in 1853, sideburns with moustaches peaked in 1877, beards alone peaked in 1892 and moustaches alone peaked from 1917 to 1919, studies have found.
A study conducted in 2012 found that women prefer men with heavy stubble over clean-shaven guys and guys sporting light stubble or full beards.
Walt Hickey at FiveThirtyEight had an interesting take on the new study. After analysing Glamour's list of the sexiest men, he found that 60 of the 100 men featured on the list had some form of facial hair, though only 11 of them had full-fledged beard.
Then again, a 2011 study showed that women didn't think bearded male faces were more attractive than beard-free faces. However, both women and men both said that bearded faces seem to belong to people with a higher social status.
We may need a few more studies on beards to decide if they're attractive or not! Until then here's BuzzFeed's list of 51 Hottest Hollywood Beards.
