Again?

As an example of how this trend is being noticed is that Jehovah's Witnesses relaxed the rules around facial hair for men in the United States at the beginning of this year.

Can't speak for anyone else, or if there are any trends, but personally it's because I, at the age of 41, finally have reliable facial hair growth. All men in my family are like this. It's a welcome trade-off for the fact that no men in my family ever develops a bald spot.

I get awful razor burn and I hate shaving. Grow beard, trim the mo' every now and then, go see my barber for a tidy up when it starts getting too wild. So much easier

Well, it does more-or-less happen on its own if you aren't paying attention.

Cause our chins are weird.

The rent (razors) is too damn high!!!

As everyone's arguing about what the trend actually is, I went looking for hard numbers. Here's some data spanning the Victorian to the late Cold War, from a paper by Dwight E. Robinson, but the link to it itself appears to be broken now.

Unfortunately, more recent information is googlebombed with people's lightly supported fluff pieces, so a cursory look didn't turn anything like this up for the 80's, 90's, 00's, and 10's.

Hides my fat face.

I feel like beards are a reaction to the clean-cut look of the 1980s and 90s. The mainstream aesthetic was clean-cut brutalism, from architecture to facial hair. People in media lived in almost empty spaces made of concrete and hard lines. Even the grunge/plaid look of the 90s featured beardless dudes with a hint of stubble.

In the 2000s, there was a reaction against that. People looked for alternatives. Hipsters grew beards and mustaches. Instead of IKEA catalogs, movie characters lived in cottage-core wizard hangouts or busy apocalyptic shelters. This will continue for a while.

In the next decade or two we're going to see a reaction against that. Politics are going to get funky and I think that'll help get us back to clean-cut and brutal. But here's hoping for a hirsute solar-punk future. Given a choice, I'd take a 1990s-style perfect shave in a solar-punk future, but that's just me.

Screw beards, ALL HAIL THOMPSON AND RITCHIE!

Have you seen how much a razor costs nowadays?

Im lazy. Dont like my beard, but cbf shaving.

I can't stop it! It's out of control. As if my facial hair has a mind of it's own.

Same reason I wear a brown onion on my belt

Lol, of course Lemmy posts this picture.

I hate shaving and I think it's a waste of time. I think facial hair can also act to make your appearance more visually interesting if you prefer to keep your hair cut really short like I do.

Because I can and it looks dope when I put in the time and trim it right.

I really fucking hate wasting my time shaving and gave up on it during the pandemic, then people told me I looked better with it.

I have a closely cropped beard. I grew it in the pandemic just to see if I could. It didn't look too bad and my wife didn't object so I kept it. Beats shaving every day.

I've had a beard for 10+ years now. I was going thru a really rough period and didn't do much hygiene. Once I got out of that rut, I kinda liked it. My spouse, who initially said they didn't like beards, complained when I shaved it.

I've always wanted one. I have a baby face and it makes me look older and people take me more seriously.

I'm slightly less fugly with it, I hope.

But I grew up admiring beards. So I finally decided to grow one over COVID only to find out I got screwed genetically in that area too.

In the US they were definitely out of fashion in the '80s and '90s. They were fashion statement that said "I'm a gross hippie" or worse, a BeeGee.

I was a teen at the time and the consensus among teen girls was that a beard was the ultimate dealbreaker of a physical attribute. Makes sense, really, because most guys our age couldn't grow a nice one if they wanted to. (And also - hippies are gross). I always respectfully disagreed, and would point to our classmate, Murad. He had pretty well grown facial hair by junior year and he looked fiiiinne.

The exception that proved the rule? Luckily (for Murad) my classmates generally agreed, but refused to back down from their opinion in general.

That attitude persisted, with the occasional appearance of a goatee or soul patch in the late '90s, both of which proved to be a gateway drug that led to the appearance of proper beards. I think a lot of guys would have liked to have beards, but realized that they were driving away potential partners. But they were pretty normal by 2010.

I'll drop this line from wikipedia, which should illustrate just how boringly mainstream beards have become in the US.

Since 2015 a growing number of male political figures have worn beards in office, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and Senators Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton.

Damn hippies.

It's been trending since COVID

There's a strong correlation between haircuts and facial hair, and economic uncertainty.

I grew a beard after I got food poisoning and the flu back-to-back. I couldn't be arsed to shave.

I did try shaving years later but I hated nicking my chin with a razor and doing it every day was a pain.