Let’s face it, the vast majority of people who both go bald and have beards are men. Is this a coincidence?
These scientists think not! In fact, they believe that the reason men go bald is to compensate for the heat they retain by growing a beard. In support of this idea, their study from 1988 found that the area of skin covered by men’s beard hair correlates with the area of skin with sweat glands on the forehead and calvaria (the top of the head).
Furthermore, for men, the rate of sweat evaporation was higher on the forehead than the beard area, while the evaporation rate for women and boys was about the same for the two areas. They took another measurement of the men’s beard area and sweat areas 10 years later (after the balding had proceeded apace, see second abstract below), and found that the same correlation ...
