Why are many men growing beards again ?
Why are many men growing beards again ?
Yesterday I passed a barbershop and saw ads on their wall outside of men with beards and short hair. It is a revival or saving electricity ?
SAVING ELECTRICITY LOL WUT
The biggest problem with growing a beard is that it only looks good after a certain amount of time. When people grow beards it's usually when they are on vacation because it is nice not having to shave and you dont have to look professional with a crazy half grown beard.
A couple of years ago the word took an extended vacation and a lot of people took the opportunity to grow a beard.
There is a time while growing a beard that it looks like shit.
Most of the people shave it off to not go through it.
But the pandemic meant people could go for weeks without seeing an other human. Which is the perfect time to grow a beard and get over the awkward phase without getting laughed at too much.
Could be recency bias, could be that fashion is a cycle that repeats and old fashions are rediscovered. Could be laziness because at some point it becomes easier to trim a beard once every month than shave everyday.
Some people's skin also can't handle daily trauma from razors.
It also looks more interesting than a vanilla clean shave, imo. People might be looking to stand out for that reason.
The +5 charisma buff was too hard to pass up.
I always figured rona caused a big enough surge in beards owing to WFH allowing folks to get past the scruff hump that beards could be back on the table again.
It's crazy how long it's been since we've had a bearded president in the US.
Linux market share must be growing
First there was WWII, when all men had to be skinheads. Those men continued shaving, and this became a culture handed down to their boys. Now, we’re rebelling against the elders who fucked up everything, so we grow beards to show that we’re different to them.
Source. A lumberjack appered in front of me in a dream I had in 2009.
If I may quote Nick Offerman...
I grow a beard because I am neither a child nor a woman.
Well, it does more-or-less happen on its own if you aren't paying attention.
Because it grew back?
Ages ago, I won a bet that I would get carded at the pub if I shaved, even if I was wearing an expensive suit. I was 35 at the time.
Fashions change. We were about due for a swing back to beardy, I reckon.
Personally, I'm bald, and I grow a really good one that, like, holds a shape. It just makes sense.
I'm lazy and can't be fucked shaving regularly
Personally I've always found most men look more attractive with beards (I'm a straight dude) so I grew one as soon as I could.
After having it for a while I decided to shave as I hadn't seen my actual face in a few years. After I shaved I realized that I have very chubby cheeks that make me look like a literal child.
I'll never clean shave again
Again?
As an example of how this trend is being noticed is that Jehovah's Witnesses relaxed the rules around facial hair for men in the United States at the beginning of this year.
Cause our chins are weird.
Can't speak for anyone else, or if there are any trends, but personally it's because I, at the age of 41, finally have reliable facial hair growth. All men in my family are like this. It's a welcome trade-off for the fact that no men in my family ever develops a bald spot.
Permanently Deleted
As everyone's arguing about what the trend actually is, I went looking for hard numbers. Here's some data spanning the Victorian to the late Cold War, from a paper by Dwight E. Robinson, but the link to it itself appears to be broken now.
Unfortunately, more recent information is googlebombed with people's lightly supported fluff pieces, so a cursory look didn't turn anything like this up for the 80's, 90's, 00's, and 10's.
I get awful razor burn and I hate shaving. Grow beard, trim the mo' every now and then, go see my barber for a tidy up when it starts getting too wild. So much easier
Screw beards, ALL HAIL THOMPSON AND RITCHIE!
Hides my fat face.
I don't grow it really, it grows on me. Sometimes I style it, sometimes I shave it off.
Sadly it won't ever look like a proper full beard because it grows very sparsely on the chins
I feel like beards are a reaction to the clean-cut look of the 1980s and 90s. The mainstream aesthetic was clean-cut brutalism, from architecture to facial hair. People in media lived in almost empty spaces made of concrete and hard lines. Even the grunge/plaid look of the 90s featured beardless dudes with a hint of stubble.
In the 2000s, there was a reaction against that. People looked for alternatives. Hipsters grew beards and mustaches. Instead of IKEA catalogs, movie characters lived in cottage-core wizard hangouts or busy apocalyptic shelters. This will continue for a while.
In the next decade or two we're going to see a reaction against that. Politics are going to get funky and I think that'll help get us back to clean-cut and brutal. But here's hoping for a hirsute solar-punk future. Given a choice, I'd take a 1990s-style perfect shave in a solar-punk future, but that's just me.
I just do whatever the last attractive person who gave me advice on my appearance told me to do
The rent (razors) is too damn high!!!
Im lazy. Dont like my beard, but cbf shaving.
I can't stop it! It's out of control. As if my facial hair has a mind of it's own.
World fucked, why buy razor
Lol, of course Lemmy posts this picture.
I hate shaving and I think it's a waste of time. I think facial hair can also act to make your appearance more visually interesting if you prefer to keep your hair cut really short like I do.
I'm slightly less fugly with it, I hope.
But I grew up admiring beards. So I finally decided to grow one over COVID only to find out I got screwed genetically in that area too.
Because I can and it looks dope when I put in the time and trim it right.
I've had a beard for 10+ years now. I was going thru a really rough period and didn't do much hygiene. Once I got out of that rut, I kinda liked it. My spouse, who initially said they didn't like beards, complained when I shaved it.
I've always wanted one. I have a baby face and it makes me look older and people take me more seriously.
I really fucking hate wasting my time shaving and gave up on it during the pandemic, then people told me I looked better with it.
I grew one so people would stop thinking I'm 12.
In the US they were definitely out of fashion in the '80s and '90s. They were fashion statement that said "I'm a gross hippie" or worse, a BeeGee.
I was a teen at the time and the consensus among teen girls was that a beard was the ultimate dealbreaker of a physical attribute. Makes sense, really, because most guys our age couldn't grow a nice one if they wanted to. (And also - hippies are gross). I always respectfully disagreed, and would point to our classmate, Murad. He had pretty well grown facial hair by junior year and he looked fiiiinne.
The exception that proved the rule? Luckily (for Murad) my classmates generally agreed, but refused to back down from their opinion in general.
That attitude persisted, with the occasional appearance of a goatee or soul patch in the late '90s, both of which proved to be a gateway drug that led to the appearance of proper beards. I think a lot of guys would have liked to have beards, but realized that they were driving away potential partners. But they were pretty normal by 2010.
I'll drop this line from wikipedia, which should illustrate just how boringly mainstream beards have become in the US.
Since 2015 a growing number of male political figures have worn beards in office, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and Senators Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton.
Damn hippies.
I grew a beard after I got food poisoning and the flu back-to-back. I couldn't be arsed to shave.
I did try shaving years later but I hated nicking my chin with a razor and doing it every day was a pain.
The mid 2010s trend plus COVID putting everyone into goblin mode.
Receding chins
I've had facial hair in one form or another since I was 13, now 45 and have a shorter ZZ-Top kind of beard. Wife refuses to let me shave it off.
It tickles.
I mean, beards are in fashion for several years now, aren't they?
I personally started growing a beard, because my skin is easily irritated and I don't like walking arround looking like a pizza. Luckily I also think I look better with a short, well kept full beard. Beards either take time or look like shit though in my experience.
I'm growing it to see how long it gets until it gets too annoying. Every day I want to shave it off or at least cut it fairly short.
When I was still in the closet, I grew and maintained a big beard as part of my attempts at performative masculinity.
Not saying that this is what's happening with most men who're growing 'em out, but sometimes I see a bloke with a well maintained set of facial hair looking absolutely miserable and my egg radar starts shrieking.
You gotta keep it trimmed and combed or it looks like a rats nest
The question is: why are you shaving? Why are you so afraid of looking like yourself?
When you have a beard, people respect you. They listen when you talk and hold doors open for you. I have a hard time trusting a man with a clean shaved face, because our interaction is starting off with a lie. I feel the same way about makeup and fake eyebrows and plastic surgery.