According to Science, Beards Are Just About to Start Becoming Unpopular

Attention hipsters and men in general: We have reached peak of beard popularity. It's over. The beard trend has been going strong for years, but you can mark it's on a downward slide. In a new study, researchers in Australia found that while women still love beards, the more there are, the less attractive they become. We have saturated the face of the human male with hair, and now we're paying the price.

The reason for beard overload? It's evolution, actually. The team — led by professor Bob Brooks — found that hairy men are up against something called "Negative frequency-dependent selection." This is a term that refers to the evolutionary process where the attractiveness of something is dependent on its popularity. In other words, the more often something occurs in nature, the less we desire it. How fitting is this, by the way? Beards, the mark of the hipster, have been declared dead because they're popular, a term that makes most hipsters melt into a puddle of flannel and suspenders.

In Brooks' study, straight and bisexual women and straight men viewed online photos of men in different stages of beard growth, including clean shaven, light stubble, heavy stubble, and full beard. The participants were split into three subgroups, with one viewing only clean faces, one viewing only full beards and one viewing all four stages of growth. The volunteers were then asked to rate the attractiveness of the faces on a scale ranging from "very unattractive" to "very attractive." Afterward, all participants then looked at another set of faces with various degrees of facial hair and rated them as well.

"Across all groups, the volunteers rated beards and light or heavy stubble as more attractive than clean-shaven faces, and heavy stubble was rated more attractive than full beards," the researchers reported. "But the preference for facial hair was greatest in the group who saw only clean-shaven men, and least pronounced in the group who saw only bearded men. Beards were rated as having intermediate attractiveness by the group who saw both bearded and non-bearded faces."

The results clearly showed that beards were only attractive when there's not that many of them. "The idea is that perhaps people start copying the George Clooneys and the Joaquin Phoenixs and start wearing those beards, but then when more and more people get onto the band wagon the value of being on the bandwagon diminishes, so that might be why we've hit 'peak beard,'", Brooks explained to BBC News.

Pay attention to the most hipster heavy areas in your city over the coming months. Don't be surprised if the beards start slowly disappearing. While some bearded dudes don't care about being on trend, the hipsters definitely do. Clean shaven is in, and so the hipster will follow. Because that's what's so funny about hipsters — they think they're doing what no one else is doing, but in fact they're doing what everyone is doing.

[Image created from pic via Flickr - Bob]