What are the scientific effects that take place when a man grows a beard?
I’m pretty sure and I suppose you’ve noticed that beards are quite fashionable…
Today this kind of look is used by all kinds of people, but before, growing a beard was associated with mountain people, hippies, lumberjacks, townspeople, barbarians and dirty people. But the fashion has changed, nowadays we can see advertising posters with people with beards, we can find people on fashion shows parading with beards and even in important business conferences or meetings with top managers of companies, who let themselves grow beards.
Nowadays we can see headlines from different newspapers which say that beards are going to disappear and that fashion has its trends, that in a few years wearing a beard will no longer be well seen. Don’t believe that, beards are here, they are here to stay.
Do an exercise, ask someone who has had a beard from your group of friends and see how it tells you that your inner wolfman appears and that life changes when you have a beard. People will look at you differently, causing different first impressions than when you didn’t have a beard.
Believe it or not, life changes when you have a beard, the impact of having a beard is much greater than you would expect.
In today’s article we will see some studies made by scientists to see the results of wearing a beard and how this affects your life.
The beard acts in a beneficial way for you against skin cancer.
Sunburn is a big problem for many of us, the hairs on our head help to avoid burning our scalp when the sun hits us, as the beard does the same for the cheeks, the lower and upper lip and the chin. It’s important to tell you that if you burn the rest of your face where you don’t have hair don’t shave until your face colour fades, otherwise you’ll have a level of colour in your face that will make you look a little stupid. But we have seen that with a beard you can’t burn certain parts of your face, so as you might think this helps protect you from skin cancer.
The University of Queensland has conducted a study showing that having a facial hair (beard) reduces exposure to skin cancer by a third compared to a face with no facial hair at all. The beard acts as protection against ultraviolet rays between 2 and 21 Upf, which in Christian terms means that it protects 90-95 more than a shaved face. With this data we see how the fact of having skin cancer on your face is considerably reduced. A very interesting and useful fact to know, but if you don’t have hair on your forehead in your arms or neck don’t stop applying sunscreen because otherwise you can catch this type of cancer because of those unprotected areas.
You will save a lot of time if you don’t shave
We could say that life goes by very fast and we don’t really value our period of freedom and youth, because I’ll be frank, the average number of hours a man spends throughout his life shaving is 3,350 hours in front of the mirror, really a waste of time, especially if you think it’s a waste of time because you’ll be scratching your cheeks to cut some of the hair left on your face.
The number has been revealed by the New York Times, and the downside of it all is that no matter how hard you shave, or how deep you reach for the hairs to shave, the pores will end up opening up and the hairs will end up coming out. Visualize for a moment a forest full of very big trees, imagine yourself in the middle of the forest every day with a path that you have to walk and that you have to cut all the trees, something endless and a big nightmare for that woodcutter, because that’s the way his every morning routine would have to be, so endless and heavy.
Think also about the hours that we have mentioned before that you are going to spend and that you could dedicate to an endless number of different activities, if you want to finish a project, if you want to play a game, if you want to get in shape. Think that the power of time is very important and that little by little everything adds up and becomes something much bigger.
You can become more attractive
The attraction is based on normal tastes, and it is clear that all people have different tastes and like totally different things. But when we refer to tastes as a general tendency, there is an average based on research that shows that a healthy and cared beard on a man will make this man look more attractive.
The University of Queensland carried out surveys where they asked more than 9,000 heterosexual women what their tastes were and what they found attractive about men.
As you can imagine, the results varied greatly, but it was possible to discover what most women thought of men and what prejudices they drew from different men in relation to their styles.
Well, most of the women said that a man with a long and caring brava is good for a long term relationship. Men with less or no noticeable amount were determined to be one-night stands. The final resolution and the idea that came out of the study was that women prefer a bit of a mess.
Men with good moustaches and who look good in profile are also given higher scores in the gay audience. Do not hesitate, if you want to try new maneuvers to find a partner think that science and statistics are on your side, and will be more likely to find someone for your life.
Have you ever wondered why Father Christmas has a beard?
Men who live in winter climates most of the year grow a beard in a deep and rough way because it is a layer of insulation against the cold, it does exactly what you want it to do.
Anthony Rossi is a dermatologist who was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and he says that having a beard acts against the cold in a way that it is a totally natural scarf, this may not seem to be noticed and the difference will not be great, but it is definitely known that it acts against the cold in a very big way which provides a great difference of temperature in your body.
But ask yourself why animals living in colder climates have hair all over their bodies, this is to protect them from the cold.
Even so, I recommend that if you get cold in your city during the winter, or if you go to live in areas where it is considerably cold, you should let the natural scarf that we men have grow.
It is rough and rough like a stone on the outside, but soft and clean on the inside.
It has always been said that you should not judge a book by its cover, as it is the same with beards, there are beards that look dirty and ugly on the outside, but if you look and if you are allowed to investigate the beard on the inside you will realize that it is clean, most men who have a beard, they usually do not spend time shaving because they spend that time taking care of their wonderful beard.
The factor that makes the skin that is protected by the beard soft is because it blocks the exposure to the sun, this what develops are less spots by the sun, less wrinkles and so on.
It can happen that if a man who has not shaved for 30 years then shaves is very likely to look 10 years younger.
The beard can sometimes make you look older, it can be a symbol of aging . But this is not the case, you are protected from the sun and all the other problems, even if you look older you will have a much healthier skin. And if you shave in the future you will look much younger than your actual age.
Another thing that keeps your face so soft is the fact that you can’t touch the inside of your beard so often, this causes you to not be removing the oil that is on your cheeks or chin. This oil is what preserves your skin, this in the long run will be very noticeable if at some point in your life you shave, the beard can make you look older in a short period of time, but in the long run you will look much younger than others!
It’s called “BARB” for some reason
After having a beard for more than 15 years I can say that I have found only one big disadvantage to having hair on my face, the problem that is easy to solve but sometimes gets a little heavy is when eating and drinking, the food and liquid always end up one way or another, tucked and hidden in my bushes. In the end it’s all a matter of getting used to it, for example, when I asked for a beer and drank at first with the foam because I realised that every time I took a sip of the beer I had to wipe my lip. In the end it becomes a habit and there’s no problem, but if anything I had to comment on it was this.
We continue with the problem of the beer, you will think that there is no crazy person who has given importance to how much beer is lost for each sip and you have some of this precious liquid left in your beard, right?
Well, there is a famous study made by Guines where they found that 162,719 pints are lost in the beards of UK residents every year. This is because 0.56 millilitres per pint is lost in beards. This means that if you drink about 180 beers a year you would be throwing away a pint and a half.
When it is better to grow a beard to have a good growth
If you are looking for the best time of the year to grow a beard, the answer is November, on this date you can embrace your inner wolf cub, try it out, at this stage you will surprise your partner when you start growing a beard, and maybe they will also follow you in terms of the fashion you will start at work.
It has been proven that growing a beard in November is the best time, this is due to a study carried out by the British Journal of Dermatology which shows that the hair grows most in November, at the end of the summer the beard tends to reach its maximum, but when it goes to August and September it slows down considerably. In case you are interested the hair on the thighs is also related to the growth phase as the beard, the point where it reaches its greatest size will be in August and September, and will start to slow down after August and September. The study was during the growth of the beard of 14 men starting in November and seeing how it developed after 18 months. From there they drew the conclusion of the study.
How beards can change people´s opinions about you
I don’t need to comment that the beard will change people’s opinion about you, it’s like if you dye your hair a striking colour, or if you remove your eyebrows, or if you cut your hair totally bald. The beard apart, gives a good image about you, compare it for example if you go with tattoos on your face and hair of some colour, unfortunately what opinion do you think people will have about you? Well, with the beard the same, people will look at you normally in a better way.
This can be good? Or is it Bad? Well, according to studies conducted by Psychology Today, beards show your personality. They say that men with beards tend to be more masculine, dominant and socially mature.
Another thing they are related to is that they are responsible, older and parental figures.
Another study where it is shown that men with beards are different from shaved men is a New Republic study. This experiment is based on taking pictures while making different expressions of the face, first with a beard and then when they have shaved. The things that attracted the attention of everyone is that when they were angry and had a beard they looked much more aggressive than when they did not have a beard. This kind of angry and bearded expressions support the theory that the beard makes us more masculine, more aggressive and serious.
You can compare him to Thanos when acting in Marvel for example, if you see him in the movie Avengers 4 you will see how he intimidates more.
Leave behind all your ingrown hairs
Having a beard and taking care of it, or shaving every day is not like flicking a switch and ending up shaving in a second, beard care takes time, but skin care if you are a man who does not wear a beard is even heavier and takes even more time. So if you’re a man who fate has given him a beard take advantage of it, by cutting with a sharp blade the beard hairs can cause ingrown hairs, these hairs as I guess you know are very ugly, and apart from painful to remove, these hairs are the result of shaving without stopping and exerting pressure against the chin or some part of the face. They have been cut so many times that the hair just happens to grow underneath the skin.
That if most people who shave tend to have a certain degree of skin irritation, this can vary depending on the level of skin you have in terms of sensitivity and the type of hair that your body develops, a more sensitive skin will make the area where you shave redden much more. The curly and thicker hairs are usually the types of hair that end up in the skin. The prohibitions of some offices where beards are forbidden do not do your skin any good, so try to avoid this type of work. Frequent shaving can develop scars on the skin that will not go away and stay there forever, also shaving strokes, dark marks on certain areas of the face and even some kind of infections from daily shaving. Naturally men should not have to shave, if we grow hair in certain areas of the body is for some reason, think of a tree, while it grows we do not cut the leaves. It is the same with hair on men.
Can a man’s beard contain germs?
We could start by answering in a very simple way, the beard and its study is always very contradictory.
Many times the beard acts on our health in a sometimes magical way, other times the beard acts in a tragic way, other times in a lucrative way and or sometimes in a painful way.
The beard can appear in different ways, you can let it come out like a forest, or you can simply take care of it and subdue it. If you let it grow like a forest out of control, you may have problems that you cannot control in the long run. You must be very careful, the beard can contain things that you do not know that are there, if you receive kisses in the beard the one who gives them may be kissing a lot of used things, not clean things!
Let’s comment on a study made by European Radiology, this study shows that men’s beards are much dirtier than a dog’s hair. Think well about this information I just gave you, supposedly dogs are washed like a man, neither do they roll in sand and poop. In this European Radiology report, 30 samples of dog hair were collected from various areas of the dog’s body, and then a total of 18 samples of bearded hair were taken from underneath the mouth, one of the dirtiest areas. The results showed that 23 of the hairs had high microbial counts, compared to men. What this study showed is that dogs can be considered cleaner than some of the men’s beards.
And if you are wondering why the dogs were compared to the men’s hairs it was to see if they could be compared to the same MRI scans. The results came as a great surprise to the researchers, the ones with the biggest problem are not the dogs but the humans.
Is the beard really that dirty?
Calm down, after reading the paragraph above it is normal that you have been a little scared, but it is only one study of many that have been done, and as we mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph the beard has very contradictory studies, so you don’t need to run to the hairdresser. A study from the Journal of Hospital Infection shows that male doctors with beards are less likely to be colonized by (MRSA) a very unpleasant bacteria prone to antibiotic resistance.
Another study published in the Journal involving the washing of beards in the United States says beards have antibiotic qualities themselves, and the bacteria in the beard will kill those that do the most damage to the body.
So don’t panic, you can keep growing those 30,000 hairs around your face. Although you know that beards can contain some kind of biological problem, you only have to use common sense to wash them, little by little you’ll see that they are not a problem for your health.
All parts of the body that have hair are also a source of growth for bacteria, so do not worry, consult how to wash your beard and enjoy that good hair.
What is the reason why some men can’t grow a beard?
No matter what kind of beard we are talking about, from four small hairs on the chin, to big beards or wide moustaches, the male beard could be said to be a fashion that has been with us since the first world war. At that time, any man who could grow a beard would leave it behind, they were not interested in shaving at all. This fashion started to decline when they started using gas masks in the war, for their good adjustment they needed not to have hair on their face. In the year 2000, beards started to appear everywhere and of all types, it has become the main trend for men to grow beards.
How did they come back into fashion?
As we have mentioned before, there was a period of a few years when beards were no longer left, they were only used by older people. During the 90’s it was very popular. All the clean, daily shaving that men used to do.
The beards in the 90’s were only seen in athletes and little else. A dark time for lovers of facial hair.
Clean cheeks disappear
Thanks to time the days of clean cheeks have disappeared (at least for now)
It is also a problem for some men, because it is not easy to follow fashion, imagine that you are inverse, at that time you could be called feminine for not having hair on the cheeks. A study carried out in the United States says that at least 24% of Americans cannot grow a beard, they do not have that hair on their face. Another 7% do not even try and do not know if they could have a good beard. It has been shown that men who have the problem of not growing their beards in the long run have feelings of lack of masculinity.
Lack of easy hair can be related to testosterone, this inability to grow facial hair often causes a complex, and many men are ashamed of it. Testosterone regulates secondary male sexual characteristics, so if you don’t have as much male hormone, and you have more female hormone, your problem will be that this female hormone slows down the growth of hair on your body. Although if you have DHT your beard will grow, this element is responsible for making your face grow beautiful, it is a derivative of testosterone.
Can we blame the DHT?
As we explained earlier, DHT is the main reason why we have hair on our faces. Well, yes, we can blame the DHT for not having a beard, this deficit affects our hair growth and this means that we do not have a beard. Another curious thing about the DHT that will leave you surprised is that the DHT is responsible for us going bald, the DHT will have the opposite effect on the beard with the hair, now think, you’ve seen people with a lot of hair, and no beard, or the other way around, a lot of beard and almost or totally bald. So there you have the reason why this happens. It is also important that you relax if you do not have a beard, it does not mean that you have a lack of masculinity, but that it is pure genetics that you carry in your body.
Because of the genetics some men will take longer to produce hair on the face, the period where more beard will be between 18 and 30 years, so if you have 22 and have not yet seen hair, do not worry you still have time. But if arriving at 30 you do not see anything, I recommend that you forget the beard, and get used to it because you will have that baby face the rest of your life.
Discover the story behind the famous american beard
The story behind how we take care of ourselves is very long, we wouldn’t finish it in hours, but in short it all started with the Egyptians trying to get to please the god of perfume, Nefertum. What Nefertum did was to give you a long and happy life, in order to reach him, the Egyptians melted candles on their heads to comb their hair and smell good.
Another trend that came later was what the English did with their hair, they dyed it bright red and had the skin as white as possible.
What we want to make you see is that when it comes to ode it is rarely always about appearance only, there are many things behind what wraps up fashions. The American beard in this case is not an exception, there is a meaning and a reasoning behind all this, so be prepared that I will explain the deepest meaning of the American beard.
The Lincoln beard was very discussed
The beard acts as a battlefield in society
Probably the character that comes to mind will be the former president Abraham Lincoln, this gentleman was a fanatic of the neck beard, and many people remember him for it. In those days people argued about what the beard meant and tried to come up with their own opinions about that particular style.
At that time, this Lincoln’s beard was a constant debate, he had a clean chin and was looking for his election to the presidency, this in the year 1860. A colleague of his from the elections told him that the beard could increase his popularity, and that’s what happened. The counselor said “all the ladies like mustaches, and they would make fun of their husbands to vote for you” and that’s what Lincoln did.
In 1860 Lincoln faced a problem of popularity among the media, a debate arose about the beard in which the whole country was aware of the debate, a great splendor was made on that subject.