Whiskers Facial Hair for Mens

Beard styles | Facial hair | Pinterest | Style, Beard styles and

Whiskers Facial Hair for Mens

Portable Hair Removal / July 19, 2022

The European Beard and Moustache Championships in 2010 in Leogang, in Austria: proving that the general rise in clean-shavenness is not for everyone. Photograph: Wildbild/AFP/Getty Images

Researchers used the Illustrated London News to look at the prevalence of moustaches and beards among men, and decided that there has been a general rise in clean-shavenness

Not being a barber, and not having had an adulthood that spanned 130 years, Dwight E Robinson was in no position to report firsthand the frequency of changes in relative prevalence of sideburns, moustaches and beards in London during the years 1842-1972. He used an indirect source: issues of the Illustrated London News published during that time.

"My procedure for gathering data, " Robinson explains, "was, quite literally, to take a head count, determining for any one year the comparative frequencies of men's choices among five major features of barbering: sideburns alone, sideburns and moustache in combination, beard (a category that included any amount of whiskers centring on the chin), moustache alone, and clean shavenness".

For the mathematically inclined, Robinson notes that "the number of clean-shaven men in any year is by definition the reciprocal of the sum of those in the four whisker categories".

Intent on choosing data that would accurately reflect the reality of Londoners' facial hair, Robinson excluded photos of groups (because some faces might appear only partially, or in misleading angles), royalty (because royals receive more press coverage, if not necessarily more hair, than the general populace), advertisements, and "pictures of non-Europeans".

One graph shows, beginning in the year 1885, a stark, almost unceasing rise in clean-shavenness.

Sideburns decline until about the year 1920, thereafter making only negligible appearances. Beards, too, hit bottom in 1920, but quasi-periodically grow back to modest popularity.

In that hair-oilshed year 1921, moustaches reach their all-time peak, adorning nearly 60% of the non-grouped, non-royal, non-advertised, non-non-European men appearing in the Illustrated London News. Thereafter, moustaches dominate all other forms of facial hair.

In one provocative graph, Robinson plots two grand, 115-year-long, rising-and-falling waves. One represents women's skirt width (in proportion to the women's height). The other shows the pervasiveness of beards among the male population. The skirt-width-ratio wave precedes the beard wave by a gap of 21 years.