Razor companies really want American men to shave again, and they're doing some pretty interesting things to make sure that happens. Recently, in a partnership that could only exist in this Internet-saturated era, Gillette teamed up with Tinder to see if clean-shaven men got more online action than scruffy beard-os.

And their findings certainly support those who believe we've reached peak beard. After following 100,000 anonymous, college-age male tinder users, they found that 74% of all right-swipes (swiping right on Tinder is how you "like" someone) went to clean-shaven men, who also saw 37% more matches (a Tinder "match" occurs when two people swipe right on each other's profiles) than their whiskered brethren. In some states like Minnesota and Montana, clean-shaven men got right-swipes at 1.74 times the rate of the bearded.

To investigate these findings further, Gillette and Tinder recruited bearded users who wanted to keep their facial hair, asking them to keep using Tinder exactly as they had been for one more week. Then, they asked them to shave and upload their new, fresh-faced photos to Tinder for one week. When Gillette and Tinder looked at the data for both weeks, they found that the men saw a 19% average increase in right-swipes when clean-shaven, with nearly a quarter of participants seeing an upswing in right-swipes of at least 60%.

Finally, to nail the point home, researchers took before-and-after photos of participants to a college campus to ask 284 women which they preferred, finding that 91% of those college women preferred photos of clean-shaven men.

While critics will obviously claim Gillette is a biased researcher, the hard data from Tinder is intriguing. It echoes not only the academic study that produced the "peak beard" theory, but also recent research that eBay fashion undertook this past summer that said women weren't as into beards as men.

Of course, this being a marketing ploy at least in part, Tinder and Gillette coined the catch phrase "Shave right. Get swiped right," which it seems just might be true.

Andrew D. Luecke Style Editor, Esquire Digital Before coming to esquire.com, Andrew D.

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