The peak of peak beard reports actually came a year later, in spring 2014, with a study from the University of New South Wales called “Negative frequency-dependent preferences and variation in male facial hair”. It appeared to show that beards were an advantage in sexual selection when their prevalence was low, but that ubiquity made them less attractive.
“In the 1850s it was to do with fears among men about what was happening to masculinity,” says Dr Alun Withey, author of Concerning Beards: Facial Hair, Health and Practice in England 1650-1900. “Think of the Industrial Revolution: there’s lots of guys having to work together in new ways and new places: offices, factories. There are calls by women for more rights and more power, and there’s a feeling in the air that manliness is being diminished.
The Victorian beard movement began to dissipate in the 1870s, but facial hair didn’t disappear; it diversified. In late-19th-century America, streetcar tickets were printed with illustrations of five male faces: clean-shaven, side-whiskered, moustachioed, goateed and fully bearded. Conductors clipped the face most closely resembling the passenger to prevent the ticket being passed on.
There was, I should also point out, not an ounce of daring in my decision. In 2011, on the advancing slopes of peak beard, having facial hair made you almost invisible. It attracted very little comment. Even my wife hardly seemed to notice the change. In those early weeks only my youngest son, then about 12, mentioned it.“I don’t know,” I said, stroking the chin part, a mannerism I’d been rehearsing in secret. “How do I look with it?”“Hippies are from the 60s,” I said.
Crisis what crisis