It’s not just Williamsburg anymore — young people across the U.S. revere the beard. The facial hair craze is so popular that some men are paying as much as $7,000 for a beard transplant. However, if the trend continues, new research indicates why it will eventually reverse course: We find beards attractive only when they’re rare.
To test the sexual power of the beard, 36 men’s faces were captured in a series of photographs that followed them through various stages of beard growth, from a clean shave to a full beard. Then they rounded up 1,453 heterosexual women and 213 homosexual or bisexual men to rate the faces.
Participants saw two rounds of faces: The first contained 12 men who were either all clean-shaven or all bearded; the second contained a mixture of both. Participants rated the attractiveness of faces on a Likert’s scale where -4 was very unattractive and ...
