Men With Beards Are Better Partners, According To A Study

Apologies to all of you guys who struggle to grow facial hair, but I have some bad news for you.

A study has deemed men with beards as being not only more attractive to women but also better boyfriends.

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Maybe it's time then to get rid of your razor and shaving cream and let your facial hair do its thing.

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Now, as someone who dates a clean-shaven man who I think is pretty great (hi Tom), this study is going to need substantial evidence to convince me it's got some standing.

Mainly since undoubtedly facial hair does not have an impact on whether a man is a good partner or not as that's more down to personality.

So why does the study claim otherwise?

A recent research report The Masculinity Paradox: Facial Masculinity and Beardedness Interact to Determine Women’s Ratings of Men’s Facial Attractiveness, looked at the connection between men’s facial hair and women's preferences.

Organized by the Barnaby Dixson of the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland, this investigation asked 8,520 women to rate men, with and without facial hair, concerning ‘relationship longevity’ to find out which ones were considered to be long-term relationship material.

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It turns out that the bearded selection came out on top!

The researchers edited these images using computer graphics to have a variety of facial hair from clean-shaven to stubble to full-on beards.

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Every single one of the 8,520 women who took part rated the bearded men as the highest compared to the clean-shaven ones.

The women also said that they'd consider these men as being long-term relationship material while clean-shaven men were more suitable for casual relationships.

And what is more, the bigger the beard, the more they were considered as being marriage material.

The research paper said:

"Results showed a significant interaction between beardedness and masculinity on attractiveness ratings. Our findings suggest that beardedness may be attractive when judging long-term relationships as a signal of intrasexual formidability and the potential to provide direct benefits to females.

Male-typical facial features such as a pronounced brow ridge and a more robust jawline may signal underlying health, whereas beards might signal men’s age and masculine dominance.

However, masculine faces are judged as more attractive for short-term relationships over less male faces, whereas beards are judged as more attractive than clean-shaven faces for long-term relationships."

Nevertheless, I would argue that only because these women thought that bearded men would be more suitable for a long-term relationship, that doesn’t necessarily mean that in reality, they'd be better boyfriends.