Yesterday I passed a barbershop and saw ads on their wall outside of men with beards and short hair. It is a revival or saving electricity ?
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Could be recency bias, could be that fashion is a cycle that repeats and old fashions are rediscovered. Could be laziness because at some point it becomes easier to trim a beard once every month than shave everyday.
Some people’s skin also can’t handle daily trauma from razors.
It also looks more interesting than a vanilla clean shave, imo. People might be looking to stand out for that reason.
I look better with a beard, it’s not that deep
Same. I shaved mine a while back and my best friend was blunt - “You look better with the beard”.
Righto. Beard it is.
Same here. I used to shave my head and face but recently I went through a period of over-work and didn’t have time to shave. Everyone told me I looked better with hair and beard, including the wife. So hair and beard it is then
Some people’s skin also can’t handle daily trauma from razors.
Pili multigemini…
I might have fucked up the order, but it means “multiple twin hairs”. Like, where just one hair should grow out of your skin, you have multiples.
If you let it just grow, you’re fine. But if you shave it’s very easy for it to be ingrown because the “hole” the hairs come thru was only meant for one hair.
When I was in the military and had to shave every day it was horrible. I don’t know if shaving makes more grow, but I’d have stubble thicker than mechanical pencil lead, and when I’d pluck it I’d find out it was 3-5 hairs attached to the same “root”. One of those becoming ingrown is a huge hassle.
With a beard, it’ll just shed normally or come out when I comb it. The problem is when you shave and the hair bunch has to keep pushing thru the skin over and over.
In the US they were definitely out of fashion in the '80s and '90s. They were fashion statement that said “I’m a gross hippie” or worse, a BeeGee.
I was a teen at the time and the consensus among teen girls was that a beard was the ultimate dealbreaker of a physical attribute. Makes sense, really, because most guys our age couldn’t grow a nice one if they wanted to. (And also - hippies are gross). I always respectfully disagreed, and would point to our classmate, Murad. He had pretty well grown facial hair by junior year and he looked fiiiinne.
The exception that proved the rule? Luckily (for Murad) my classmates generally agreed, but refused to back down from their opinion in general.
That attitude persisted, with the occasional appearance of a goatee or soul patch in the late '90s, both of which proved to be a gateway drug that led to the appearance of proper beards. I think a lot of guys would have liked to have beards, but realized that they were driving away potential partners. But they were pretty normal by 2010.
I’ll drop this line from wikipedia, which should illustrate just how boringly mainstream beards have become in the US.
Since 2015 a growing number of male political figures have worn beards in office, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and Senators Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton.
Damn hippies.
My wife and I both grew up in the eighties/nineties and this was exactly her attitude for years. It was only when I went ahead and grew one anyway - despite her reservations - and she decided she actually likes the way I look with it and now won’t let me shave it off!
The influence of Marxism
I mean, they’re both coming back a bit, but I don’t know anyone who was like “well, Marx had one”.
(It’s not real analysis, I’m memeing)
(Oh, gotcha!)
From each according to his capacity I suppose
It tickles.
There is a time while growing a beard that it looks like shit.
Most of the people shave it off to not go through it.
But the pandemic meant people could go for weeks without seeing an other human. Which is the perfect time to grow a beard and get over the awkward phase without getting laughed at too much.
Can confirm, grew beard during lockdown, never went back!
Same. Still haven’t learned how to style it but it’s still better than the face I had before
Started growing mine during no-shave November 2019, and then we shut down for COVID. It was perfect timing.
I grew out my hair instead, looked like shit but now I know.
Why do people on the internet think you don’t have to shave if you have a beard? You’re just shaving less area.
Exactly, it’s actually MORE work to shave with a beard because instead of just completely removing all of the hair and you have to shape it and make sure it’s symmetrical.
Exactly. When I was clean shaven, it was easy, I could just hold the shaver against the contours of my face.
Now, with a large beard, I only need to shave every one or two weeks, but it takes much longer to do so and is much trickier. I’ve got to sculpt and shape a mound of hair manually. And every day I still brush and oil it.
Clean or short shaven was actually less effort.
Ha, NSFW example but my God when people call the tight trimmed triangle a “natural bush” on women I laugh. It’s more work to maintain than just about any other alternative.
I haven’t shaved since 2014.
I’ve (recently) stopped shaving entirely, but I use my trimmers to to a quick hackjob on the area I used to manually shave. so my facial hair care routine is about 5 minutes every 2 weeks or so, plus maybe 5 minutes a month to buzz my head. can’t believe I used to spend that much time every couple of days to look like shit. now I still look like shit but have a few more minutes
its the other way around for those people: they have a beard because they stopped shaving, not because they wanted a nice looking beard.
tbh there is a part of me that resents this “ew you grow facial hair and don’t shave around the edges to create sharp lines” view though. Its like women feeling they have to shave their legs or pits, it’s BS and people shouldn’t be judged for literally just how their body naturally is. Its not like there’s a legitimate sanitary reason for shaving legs or necks.
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Some people think beards are stylish.
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Very variable, depending on style and your personal growth pattern. I have a small patch on each cheek that has to be cleaned off, but otherwise it doesn’t require shaving. With a big beard you have to care for it like normal hair, though, with haircuts and products.
Buuut I do have the shave my whole head. Oh well.
I don’t shave and I have a beard - once in a blue moon for a special occasion, I might trim it.
It’s also easier area. Cheeks and neck are way flatter than chin.
A short trimmed beard you have to do the neck and maybe cheekbones, it’s a lot of upkeep.
I think lots of guys had that type of beard pre-covid, then let it grow out. Once it’s long enough you don’t have to do the neck because it’s hidden by the rest of your beard.
And some guys never have to do cheeks because it grows in good.
Like how 20 years ago it was cool for teenagers and 20 somethings to have goatees. It took me a while to realize most were doing it because they couldn’t grow a full beard.
There’s a lot of variation in facial hair, including where it grows and how thick.
In my case, it’s because I prefer it. Razors are expensive, and who has time to shave anyway? I’ve had a beard off and on since college in the 80s, when it made me look about five years older. Now it makes me look about 10 years younger. I’ll take it. :)
Razors are expensive,
They don’t have to be! Dual edge safety razor blades are like $10 for 100. You could splurge ($50 for a nice one, or hundreds for a really nice, probably unnecessarily expensive one) on a nice handle that will last you the rest of your life, or get just about as good a shave with one that costs $10. Heck, if you’re lucky you could find some old, nice one at a garage sale that’s already been around 70 years, and will easily still be working fine when you’re dead. Unfortunately, like just about everything else old and good, they’ve become a bit trendy, so it might be hard to find deals like you used to be able to.
Granted. I have both a safety razor and a mug & brush. It just doesn’t shave close enough. And I still just prefer a beard.
That’s fair. You can get a closer shave with more passes, but that’s hard on your skin as well. I can’t stand having too much stubble. It gets to a point where it itches like crazy. I pushed through the itchy phase once, and having a beard was alright, but I got some pretty crazy acne underneath it.
I feel you. I’m extremely lucky to never have an itchy phase while it’s growing and rarely have acne. Chalk it up to Neanderthal genetics, I guess. :)
Fashions change. We were about due for a swing back to beardy, I reckon.
Personally, I’m bald, and I grow a really good one that, like, holds a shape. It just makes sense.
I prefer to shave so individuals can see that I have a chin / jawline.
Good for you
I prefer not to shave, to make them wonder
I’ve had facial hair in one form or another since I was 13, now 45 and have a shorter ZZ-Top kind of beard. Wife refuses to let me shave it off.
As everyone’s arguing about what the trend actually is, here’s some data spanning the Victorian to the late Cold War, from a paper by Dwight E. Robinson, but the link to it itself appears to be broken now.
Unfortunately more recent information is googlebombed with people’s lightly supported fluff pieces, so a cursory look didn’t turn anything like this up for the 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, and 10’s.
Thanks, and go go gadget valid link! https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1976/robinson1976a.pdf
Dope!
Now that I think about it, you can just extrapolate that curve forwards and it matches anecdotal data about the 80’s and 90’s, reaching a similar smooth face extreme around 1990 to peak beard in the 1890. By that logic, it’s a 2-century cycle, and we’ll be back there late this century.
Personally I’ve always found most men look more attractive with beards (I’m a straight dude) so I grew one as soon as I could.
After having it for a while I decided to shave as I hadn’t seen my actual face in a few years. After I shaved I realized that I have very chubby cheeks that make me look like a literal child.
I’ll never clean shave again
Cause our chins are weird.
I’m a unix-guru.
If I were to shave I’d get a -5 penalty on my bash magic.
If I skip showers for a month I can interface directly with any device in /dev
GROSS! And can you fix my nvidia drivers???
He can’t take that risk! Don’t you know what you’re asking?
Samson was actually a sys admin whose servers had incredible uptime until his beard was shaved.
So says the unix bible
It’s been foretold that after a year without touching grass you can harness one-handed vim
If I skip showers for a month I can interface directly with any device in /dev
None of /dev will want your interface.
I hate it when when my local /dev/shm gets smelly.
/dev/zero will always be accepting.
As an example of how this trend is being noticed is that Jehovah’s Witnesses relaxed the rules around facial hair for men in the United States at the beginning of this year.
