A Study Shows That Women Prefer Men with Beards

I used to think that men with beards weren’t attractive. (My k-pop boys don’t have beards, so I guess that says a lot.)

And I still do.

But apparently, there are many ladies out there who would disagree with me.

Research

A survey was done by the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, which was conducted with 9,991 participants.

8,699 were female while the remaining 1,292 were male. For their published article, they only took into consideration the response of females aged 18 to 100.

And get this.

These women had Kinsey scale scores that indicate that they were at least as interested in men as they were in women.

How Attractive Are These Guys?

They were asked to evaluate the attractiveness of men in 3 categories: Bearded, fully bearded, or sporting a goatee.

They were also shown photographs of men (or a man) that grew their beards over a period of time.

What’s the final conclusion of this research?

Attractiveness Based on Facial Hair

The majority of women agreed that light and heavy stubble faces were more attractive than either full beards and clean-shaven faces. These findings were consistent with recent studies by Neave & Shields in 2008, Dixon and Brooks in 2013, and Janif Et Al. in 2014.

Masculine faces were judged as least attractive, followed by feminized faces.

Ranked most attractive were unmanipulated faces.

Facial Hair = Duration of Relationships

Interestingly enough, they also found that there was a significant link between facial hair and relationships.

They found that preferences for light and heavy stubble were higher for short term relationships than full beards and clean shaved faces.

Basically, if you’re a dude with light and heavy stubble, ladies would prefer like you better for short-term relationships. Sorry, dude.

Full beards and faces with stubble received higher ratings than clean-shaved faces for long-term relationships.

In general, clean shaved faces were rated the least attractive.

But keep in mind that these are just findings from a survey, and doesn’t reflect the mindset of all ladies.

More Likely To Cheat

Adding on to the fact that masculine faces were judged as least attractive, another study has found that men with “masculine faces” were more likely to be unfaithful in a relationship.

In the research that was conducted by Royal Society Open Science, it found that women tend to suspect men with masculine features of being unfaithful, and turns out? It’s true. Such men do admit to cheating or trying to steal another guy’s girlfriend.

Big yikes.

The experts say that there may be evolutionary reasons why heterosexual women have such distrust in macho men. Specifically, if a guy has a strong jaw, strong brow ridges and thinner lips, this may have increased their suspicion.

In fact, these characteristics may also help guys to spot a potential rival in their relationship. That’s pretty neat.

But It’s Not Set In Stone, Yeah?

Of course, they also stressed that people shouldn’t just jump to conclusions about a guy just because of his facial features. As they say, you can’t judge a book by its cover.

The research team also found it quite surprising that participants saw unfaithfulness so predominantly in men’s faces. They suggested that this could be due to a woman’s use of cosmetics masking links to facial features and behaviours.

Or maybe, because women are less prone to cheating than men. Which yet another study proved it’s not true.

So many studies but for men, women are still a mystery.