Is Your Beard Packed With Germs?

Hygiene

       Last year, Alun Withey, an academic historian of medicine and the body from the University of Exeter in the U.K., began a 3-year project to chart the health and hygiene history of facial hair between 1700 and 1918.

During this time, beards fell in and out of fashion. Between 1700 and 1830, the fashion was mainly for the clean-shaven look. Then the Victorian era ushered in the “beard movement” in which huge patriarchal beards -- think Darwin and Dickens -- dominated from around 1850 to the end of the 19th century.

Hippie beards were all the rage in the 1960s, culminating in one of the most famous sproutings of facial hair in recent times: the bearded model in Alex Comfort's 1972 "gourmet guide to lovemaking," The Joy of Sex. The book sold millions of copies, but by the time it was updated and republished in 2002, the bearded model had been replaced with a clean-shaven man.

Withey charts the current "hipster" beard fashion as dating from 2013. His research is still in its infancy, but a speech he gave on the subject for the Wellcome Trust last October was sold out.

He sees no end to the current trend for beards and believes the current arguments over hygiene just reflect this popularity. In a blog last May, when the TV news report comparing bacteria in beards to toilets was being picked up by news media around the world, he wrote: "In the 1660s the English churchman and historian Thomas Fuller was referring in print to the beard as 'that ornamental excrement under the chin.' Sound familiar?"