Beards Are Losing Their Cool

The more beards they see, the less attractive people find them, according to a recent study investigating the popularity of the "hipster-beard" trend.

A past report from MD Connects showed that beards are becoming so popular in metropolitan areas that men who lack the genetic inheritance to grow a full one on their own are dropping thousands of dollars on beard implant surgery to achieve their facial hair desires.

Now, a new study published in Biology Letters details how the "hipster" beard craze may have all been for naught, as people are becoming less and less attracted to the bearded look.

In an experiment involving over 1,500 people, adult men and women were shown a selection of 36 different photographs of men with a varying degrees of facial hair and were asked to then rank the men they saw according to attractiveness.

Interestingly, the researchers instantly began to recognize a very clear pattern in how the participants ranked the photos. When shown more bearded men than clean-shaven men, the participants were found to be much more partial to the clean-shaven men, ranking them the most attractive. Likewise, when shown more clean-shaven men than bearded men, the participants were found to be much more likely to rate the bearded men as most attractive.

According to the authors of the study, this phenomenon is called the principle of "negative frequency-dependent selection" (NFD) and has been a principle long accepted by evolutionary theorists, who believe that attractiveness, at least in-part, is determined by the uniqueness of an individual's traits. In the interest of producing a child with the most unique and potentially beneficial traits, humans may be actively seeking out people with unusual traits as mates.

This, of course, is bad news for the "hipster" trend that has been blamed for making beards so popular in the past several years. According to the researchers, because people are likely to see beards frequently these days, the attractiveness of facial hair has been taken down, while the more uncommon baby-faced men are looking more-and-more appealing.

Researcher Richard Brooks told PolicyMic that it once took two to three decades before a trend like this beard trend feel out of favor. That mainly because it took much longer for the trend to become popular enough to where it was no longer perceived as attractive. However, thanks to the internet, trends spread faster than ever -- leading to a potential end for the "hipster-beard-craze" in less than a decade.

The study was published in Biology Letters on April 16.

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