See How Popular Beards Have Been Since Forever
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that facial hair is gaining steam these days. We've called it the dawn of the Dandy Wildman. You can call it whatever you want. Some might even venture to say that beards, mustaches, and stubble are more popular now than they ever were. But Martin Vargic, a data enthusiast who loves making cool charts, just proved that there's more background to it than that. By combing through historical images and analyzing how often facial hair appears, he's been able to illustrate its general popularity over time.
A pretty wild undertaking, if you ask us. But let's see what we can learn from this.
For starters, it appears that the real facial-hair devotees are those residing in what Vargic labels the Arab realm. They've been doing this for a long time, only seeing a slight dip in the twentieth century. China was on pace with them for quite a while, but once 1600 hit, it was suddenly shave city.
Meanwhile, on the Continent, Southern Europe's grooming behavior seems rather erratic, with plenty of summits and trenches. What a lawless place it must have been! Their counterparts in Northwestern Europe had some ups and downs, too, but both tribes generally moved in lockstep—and generally toward cleaner faces—from around 1000 onward. Europeans! Unpredictable.
The most notable of all the trends illustrated, though, is the huge spike that happened in the late 1800s, when everybody except China was like, "YO! BEARDSSS! DO IT!!!" That same trend popped up again in what looks like the late 1970s or early '80s, when disco reigned supreme and we were all just trying to do a little dance, make a little love, and get down that night. You can also see that incline coming back in present-day Europe and North America, ancestral lands of the Dandy Wildman. (Told you.)
Will today's uptick reach the same heights as the turn of the twentieth century's did? Only time will tell. We hope Vargic will continue his research—it's probably easier now that Instagram is around.
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