Do beards make men more attractive?
Although in the topic of aesthetics and in the researches, women have preferred beardless men, but having a beard has different effects in the society, and in the studies, women and men evaluated bearded men as older and having a higher social status than the same men without a beard.
Ghazal Ziari- Some men may think that they look more attractive with a long beard, but most women don't necessarily think so.
Charles Darwin, the man whose face is remembered with a thick beard, believed that men's facial hair is like a peacock's tail: "an ornament to attract or arouse the opposite sex." No matter how successful a scientist he was, his opinion can be rejected.
Do beards and mustaches make men more attractive?
In a 2012 study, researchers asked women from two different ethnic groups, New Zealand Europeans and Samoan Polynesians, to rate the attractiveness of identical male faces, once with a beard and once without.
Interestingly, both groups of women rated faces without beards as more attractive, and the result of this survey challenges Darwin's idea that beards evolved due to female preference.
Researchers have conducted other studies on the sexual attractiveness of men's facial hair and the results are so contradictory that the researchers could not reach a clear conclusion.
Some women prefer fully groomed faces, while others prefer stubble or a full beard for men's faces. The researchers hoped to come to a clearer conclusion about the relationship between beards and sexual attractiveness, suggesting that beards may have evolved for a completely different reason, and not just the physical attractiveness of men.
Beard and gaining status among people
In a study of women in New Zealand-Samoa, although beards did not necessarily make men look more attractive, they did have other effects. In both cultures, both women and men rated bearded men as older and of higher social status than the same men without a beard.
They also found bearded men with an angry face to be more aggressive than the same men who were angry but without a beard. Dr. David Potts, a professor of anthropology and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, explained about this: "The function of facial hair is probably to make men appear more intimidating by making the lower face and jaw appear larger, and to emphasize sexual maturity and the resulting power."
Therefore, he pointed out that maybe the beard evolved to help men gain a better social status among other men; This helped our ancestors attract mates and have more offspring.
On the other hand, maybe the beard is also effective in the modern competition between men. A study conducted between 1842 and 1971 on the fashion and appearance of facial hair in Britain showed that beards became more fashionable when the ratio of single men to women was higher; That is, precisely when more men are competing for fewer women.
When Darwin was done thinking about men's beards, he spent some time researching the neck hair of animal species, including lions, stags, and lynxes, and came to the conclusion that these hairs probably evolved as a physical shield to protect the vulnerable neck area in a fight with rivals.
Now the question arises that whether the same thing is true about human beards? To test this hypothesis, a group of researchers made a model that acted like a human face. One of them explained, "We couldn't check and tap the faces of bearded and beardless men around us and evaluate the test results."
For this reason, they used epoxy fiber composite, which has the same physical strength as bone, to model the jaw bone, and to simulate facial skin without a beard and with a beard, they went to modified sheep skin and unmodified sheep skin, and then threw weights at the models and measured the impact force.
The impact force on the modified skin model was 16% higher than on the bearded skin model, suggesting that the human beard may act as a form of facial armor and protect the jaw from fracture, at least to a small extent.
When you think about the potential impact of a blow to the face, the idea of a beard acting as a protective cushion makes sense. "It is thought that jaw fractures were a catastrophic event in the evolutionary past when tools like straws were not available for easy feeding," Potts explained. "Currently, physical attack with a fist or hitting a hard object is one of the main causes of jaw fractures in the world, and it ranks second after traffic accidents." Although men's jawbones are thicker and stronger than women's, men in all societies suffer far more jaw fractures.
A 2018 study, using data from mixed martial arts (UFC) tournaments, found that beards do not prevent knockouts or enhance actual fighting ability. Some scientists argue that a beard can actually be a disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat; Because opponents can grab it.
Potts eventually concluded that the beard probably served to gain status and prestige among men, and that the beard-as-armour hypothesis is still debatable. He continued: "Perhaps a beard is useful to some extent to attract women, but compared to the large and continuous effect on the perception of dominance and authority, the effect of facial hair on attractiveness for women is less and it is less stable in different societies and over time."
Consequently, if you think that men with beards look better than men without beards, know that it all comes down to personal preference.