Ladies love a good beard but new research suggests the attractiveness of facial hair is starting to die down as it becomes more popular.
The findings suggest that evolution might be guiding a trend towards the clean shaven route. Sorry hipsters.
The study by the University of New South Wales shows that beards are more attractive the rarer they are but the more common facial hair is, the less attractive it becomes.
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According to the BBC, lead study author Bob Brooks says it is an evolutionary phenomenon called “negative frequency-dependent sexual selection”
Let’s break it down. If you’re out somewhere and every guy in the place has facial hair, the guys who are clean shaven are considered better looking.
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That means if a guy with a beard is out with his hairless friends, women would consider him to be the more attractive one of the group.
In order to determine this, researchers asked 1,452 women and 213 men to rate different images of men’s faces.
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Some were given full bearded pictures; others were shown mainly clean shaven guys while another group had a mixture of different types of facial hair.
In the end, the rarer the facial hair, the more attractive it was.
