I like that the Enlightenment (a movement of which I am a fan) triggered the clean-shaven look. Emiko Jozuka reports at Motherboard:
What causes the boom and bust of beards? Is it just that men get bored of certain styles, or do innovations in healthcare and technology also influence the whiskers men sport on their faces?
Alun Withey, a medical historian and associate research fellow at the University of Exeter, will tackle those questions during a three-year research project that examines man’s evolving relationship with facial hair. The project is supported by global medical non-profit the Wellcome Trust.
Starting from September 2015, Withey will focus his investigations between 1700 and 1918, and will investigate British beard evolution within a medical and technological framework. He will look at a wide range of sources including pictorial depictions of beards in drawings and photographs, medical records, and mentions of facial hair in adverts, diaries and letters.
“Beards,” Withey told me over the phone, “are always closely linked with how men feel about themselves.” In Tudor times, the beard, said Withey, was a visible and outward symbol of men’s masculinity and virility. To pull at a man’s beard back then was a heinous insult against his manhood. But fast forward to the 17th century, and beards had almost completely lost their appeal in Britain.
“The 18th century was the time of the Enlightenment (the Western European intellectual movement between the 1620s and 1980s that challenged authoritarian rule), so it was all about neatness and elegance—about opening up to and understanding the word. If you shave off a beard, you are opening up the face,” said Withey. “The new ideal of how a man should look was clean shaven.”
Withey explained that in the 1700s, facial hair was also closely tied to old ideas of the body, which emphasised the body’s association with the four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile). So beards themselves, said Withey, were treated as things to be eliminated or clipped—much like nails.
Filed under: Shaving
