SANTA sports one, as do many of his elves. So, in most religious iconography, does Jesus. It’s fair to say theirs aren’t quite the height of fashion. But otherwise, commentators from across Europe, the US, Latin America and Australasia are agreed: beards are in. No longer synonymous with a predilection for lentils, open-toed sandals and the saving of whales, what 10 years ago was identified as a hipster trend has grown and spread. Reports of “peak beard” have proved premature: sales of shaving products .
What’s going on? As a primatologist who studies our more hirsute cousins, I find this question, and the broader one of a beard’s purpose, fascinating. Are there any answers?
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There’s an obvious one, of course. The thickness and length of beard a man can achieve may vary, but the ability to grow one emerges at puberty, and is governed by androgens – male hormones that include testosterone. A beard is one of the most obvious signs of male sexual maturity. “This explains why facial hair has the power to outrage and why it is subject to social controls,” says , a neatly bearded cultural historian at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. “Any symbol of masculinity carries political and moral significance.” That might explain, for example, why in 1976 the US Supreme Court upheld the right of employers to decide whether or not employees could have beards. “Choosing to wear a beard in modern America can still get you drummed out of the military, fired from a job, disqualified in a boxing match, eliminated from political contention or even labelled a terrorist,” says Oldstone-Moore.
In that context, you might think the current trend for face fungus is just down to a rebellious re-emergence of the beard as a symbol of evolutionarily fit masculinity. Possibly, says bearded anthropologist and psychologist . “Many evolutionary biologists see hypertrophied facial hair as the human equivalent of the stag’s antlers or the peacock’s tail.”
If beards really are all about sexual signalling, we might expect to find them on other primates. And indeed we do. “These include our fairly close relatives such as orang-utans, to really quite distant cousins like douc langurs in Asia and mandrills and guenons in Africa,” says primatologist , UK.
Although beard size isn’t related to rank in all these animals, this observation fits with one general theory about beard evolution. For most of human evolutionary history, there was more than one bipedal ape on the block. Beards may have evolved to allow these cohabiting hominins to recognise members of their own species at a distance – one of their functions among guenons today.
An interesting corollary of this is that female guenons, orangutans, gorillas and chimps all have beards. Could early women in the human lineage have had them too? “We can probably assume this was also true for our early ancestors,” says evolutionary biologist at George Washington University in Washington DC. “But maybe the interesting question is why men have beards but women do not.” One idea is that the ancestral human beard became a sexual signal with females preferring to mate with hairy-chinned partners, so boosting male bristles.
Maybe. But if beards were a simple matter of sexual selection, the male of our species would consistently sport them. In fact, as Oldstone-Moore shows in his new cultural history of the beard, , they have regularly waxed and waned over the ages. We shouldn’t give in to the temptation of seeing this latest incarnation as a mere fashion statement of young, trendy males, he says – as some kind of inchoate response to the zeitgeist, rather like the height of women’s hemlines supposedly changing with the buoyancy of the economy. Trends in facial hair have historically not been so fickle. In the Western world, “beard movements” were particularly striking in the 2nd, 12th, 16th and 19th centuries, says Oldstone-Moore.
Each time beards regrow, they come with subtly different interpretations – although certain recurring themes are apparent. Western cultures often place hair on the chins of force- of-nature males (Hagrid from the Harry Potter books springs to mind) or equated hairiness with animalistic behaviour – think Wolverine or Disney’s interpretation of Beauty’s Beast. Shaving, meanwhile, symbolised control.
Certainly throughout Greek and Roman times a shaved face was a civilised face – a view that bearded Goths, Vandals and Vikings did nothing to dent. At odds with current clean-cut military practice, war was traditionally a province of the hairy – although some hair historians assert that Alexander the Great insisted his soldiers break with brute-bristling tradition and shave. That didn’t stick. By the Middle Ages, knights were back wearing beards as badges of manliless.
Meanwhile, the Canon law of the Christian church required monks and priests be clean-shaven, reflecting the spiritual symbolism of repressing the bestial. That, too, doesn’t seem to have been universally applied; some popes, notably Clement V, who reigned at the beginning of the 14th century, appear in portraits both with and without a beard. Perhaps the bearded portraits symbolise wisdom – the bearded sage also being a recurring cultural theme.
“Hypertrophied facial hair is the human equivalent of the stag’s antlers”
It’s a confusing picture, and it is tempting to see it as just a load of old follicles – sociology with a lab coat on. But nestling in there is a pertinent observation, says Oldstone-Moore – that what a particular beard says depends not just on who is wearing it, but on the form it takes. Luxuriant growth suggests rampant maleness, but a smaller well-groomed attachment shows attention to detail, the dexterity to do finicky things and the capacity to organise your time to make it happen – or at least the ability to accumulate the readies to pay someone to do it for you. That explanation chimes with Dunbar. “A beard is hard to do well, which may be the key to its allure,” he says.
Is this the secret of what a modern day, mid-20s metrosexual is trying to say with his full and finely groomed beard? Quite possibly, thinks Oldstone-Moore, especially if we compare this current wave of beardedness with its most recent predecessor.
Victorian patriarchs . Now, as then, we live in a rapidly changing, competitive world. Both eras are also characterised by feminist movements. “Beards helped Victorians assert themselves as men,” Oldstone-Moore says. “I think something similar is happening today. At some level, men feel a need to claim some kind of masculine distinctiveness.” In this view, the primped lumberjack beard may be a subconscious counterbalance to the urban metrosexual’s expression of his feminine side.
Differences between Victorian and modern societies might even indicate how the current trend will play out. Back then, a full chin of hair was de rigueur, but in our more pluralistic age there is no single model of manliness. “This means that beards have retained something of their nonconformist quality,” says Oldstone-Moore.
That also suggests that even if beard wearing becomes ubiquitous, men will develop their own idiosyncratic approaches to facial grooming. Styles will become baroque and bizarre. Perhaps this season’s must-have styles – and – are just the beginning. Santa’s white whiskers may come to seem like a design classic by comparison.
Check out some amazing monkey and ape beards in the gallery below:
(Images from main feature: The Gay Beards/Rex Shutterstock, Daniel Berehulak/Getty, Philipp Horak/Anzenberger/Eyevine, Jeremy Phan/National Geographic My Shot/National Geographic Creative)
This article appeared in print under the headline “Grooming marvellous”
