In 2015 we created a survey to gauge how people perceived others based on the colours they were wearing. Some interesting results sparked global interest, with fascinating conclusions (and maybe a few wardrobe changes) being made. So we decided to follow the survey up with a new one based not on colour but on style, on the state of play when it comes to workwear and body adornment – what people experience, what they expect and what they approve of. We hoped to find out if people are fully sold on the idea that the way we look at work doesn’t matter, or whether there’s still some way to go.

Fashions may change, but some clothing and appearance traditions have remained constant for decades: suits for office work; ties for interviews; female air stewards wearing plenty of makeup. But it can’t have escaped your notice that the past two decades have witnesses a societal shift in what we find normal and acceptable in the workplace.

If you’re a forty-something or older, you may have been through the metamorphosis yourself. If you’re a millennial, you probably know no different. But the informalisation of the workplace has been a revolution that few saw coming. We have no idea if it has peaked or stabilised, or if the entire global workforce will soon be expressing themselves as they please in work.

We asked questions about clothing, grooming and body adornment, as well as asking their opinions on the way some notable people dressed. The survey consisted of 510 respondents, comprising 55% females and 45% males. Split by age, 11% were aged 18–25; 16% were aged 25–35; 20% were aged 35–45; 26% were aged 45–55, and 27% were aged 55 or above.

Here's what they said.

Are tattoos still taboo?

Over the past ten years tattoos have become ubiquitous. In mainstream life (outside certain cultural groups or counter-cultures), a tattoo used to be a personal expression, small in size and usually hidden under clothing. But now it’s not unusual to see complete sleeve, leg, neck and torso tattoos. So it was natural that we would ask whether this gets under people’s skin.

40% of respondents think tattoos are just normal. 17% found them rebellious.

We asked our respondents what they think when they see someone who has extensive tattooing in a professional setting. A list of adjectives was offered, with multiple answers possible. Despite tattoos’ ubiquity, a slight minority of 40% said they found it “normal”, and 33% said it was “unprofessional”. However, only 17% said they thought tattoos were “rebellious”, 16% found them “creative” and a mere 8% found them “cutting edge”.

When asked about whether tattoos should be on show in the workplace, 52% said it was acceptable, 48% said it was not.

When we break it down by age group, there’s a definite pattern.

Q8 Do you think it is acceptable for tattoos to be on show in the workplace?

Clearly, the younger you are, the more likely you are to find tattoos acceptable in the workplace. Almost three-quarters of 18–25s were fine with tattoos, compared with only 38% of those of 55 or over. Tattooing no longer has the power to shock, and it is no longer seen as rebellious – but there are still significant groups who are negatively influenced by it. It seems likely that in 20 years’ time, there will be less of an age split as the generations brought up by tattooed parents and grandparents come of age themselves.

Everybody’s heard about the beard

Invented in 2008, the beard has been the facial hair phenomenon of the decade. OK, we know, beards were invented in 1863, but they were always slightly out there once shaving had been invented, with re-emergences occasionally sprouting, for example during the hippy period. The modern beard is far removed from that of the 60s and 70s, though. It’s treated, waxed and trimmed, and often shaved to a neat perimeter – a statement of grooming rather than a lack of it.

There are even theories about how it became popular, a plausible one blaming the recession which, combined with stubbornly expensive razor blades, helped the beard to become a style option.

So do people now find beards completely normal in professional life? Well, it depends on the job. We asked people to rate which male professionals they expected to be clean-shaven and got the following results:

Q10 In which professional roles would you expect to see a man to be clean-shaven?

People appear to prefer their doctor to be clean-shaven – more than any other profession.

There’s a marked range of opinions here, from 67% who expect male doctors to be clean-shaven down to the 23% who expect it of a social worker. It’s difficult to see a particular pattern, although with doctors, nurses and waiters appearing in the top half, perceived hygiene might play a part. Policemen might rank highly because seeing their faces might inspire trust, or perhaps a lack of beard could make them look more upstanding.

Warpain’t normal no more?

Look back at women’s fashion magazines from the 1950s or the late 70s/early 80s and you can’t miss the conspicuous amounts of makeup on show. Deep red lipstick, blusher, eyeliner and eyeshadow reigned. But there were also periods, say the 60s and the 90s onwards, where it has been less conspicuous, except for a few brief blips. It’s now relatively unusual to see a woman wearing the full makeup beyond some foundation and subtler touches around the eyes and lips.

So we asked which professions would people find it appropriate for women to wear heavy makeup. Top of the list was the waiter, a job that 59% of respondents found appropriate for heavy makeup. 54% ticked estate agent; and 52% ticked receptionist. (Multiple answers were allowable.)

Interestingly, only 34% found it appropriate for cabin crew to have heavy makeup (a stat that would surely have been much higher 20 or 30 years ago). Half the number, 17%, thought it would be appropriate for a pilot to wear heavy makeup.

18–25s are most comfortable with makeup in general. The 55+ group is the least.

At the bottom of the list was police officer with just 14%, closely followed by doctor, vet and nurse. This mirrors the preference for clean-shaven men, which could suggest that it’s not necessarily hygiene; it could be that we like to see the skin of people in positions of trust, or maybe that we expect them to be more devoted to their jobs than to their appearance.

Job to job, the ratios are similar down the ages – every age group thought waiter, receptionist and estate agent were the most appropriate for heavy makeup – but there’s a general reduction in total percentages as you go up the age groups. For example, only 6% of over-55s thought heavy makeup was fine for a doctor, compared with 19% for 18–25s.

Q11 In which professional roles do you think it is appropriate for women to wear heavy makeup?

When all jobs are added together for each group, the 55+ group seemed to think heavy makeup was appropriate in the professional setting. That’s interesting because they would have lived through the late 70s/early 80s, and possibly the 1950s too, when makeup was much more common. It obviously hasn’t rubbed off.

Corbyn & Zuckerberg: socialist icons?

Jeremy Corbyn has been an MP in the UK’s mainstream left-leaning Labour Party since 1983, but he has always been on its hard-left peripherals, rebelling against his own party hundreds of times in parliamentary votes. He has never been one to care too much about dressing sharply, either. Yet in 2015, against the expectations of most commentators and the wishes of his fellow MPs, he took over the leadership of the party.

Our survey asked respondents what they thought about the way Corbyn dressed, accompanied by a photograph from about a year previously. We asked them to check any boxes they though matched their perception of Corbyn, from: honest; scruffy; smart enough; humble; unprofessional; unique; lack of effort; and irrelevant.

The answer most agreed with was “irrelevant”, suggesting people care less about a politician’s dress than of his or her politics.

Q16 What is your perception of Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn's appearance?

However, shortly after the survey was completed, and with the 2017 Election looming, Corbyn noticeably smartened up a bit. He started wearing matching suits, pressed shirts and nice ties, clearly in an effort to make himself look “more like a politician”. With the negative perceptions ranking so lowly in the public’s minds, need he have bothered? We may never know if his new-found sharpness influenced voters, but the Labour Party did make significant gains and helped to convert the Conservatives’ majority into a non-majority largest party. (It’s entirely possible that there were other factors at play, of course …)

People don't really care how their tycoons and politicians dress.

Another person whose dress sense is often commented upon is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In many ways he’s the archetypical Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The cliché of such businesses starting out in garages and on college campuses happens to be true in many cases, and with businesses like Facebook taking off simply because people like using them, the people behind them are largely unknown until their work is used by billions. And if you’ve made your reputation wearing jeans and a T-shirt, why would you suddenly start getting suited and booted once you get there? It’s not like you’ve got anyone to impress.

So we asked the respondents the same questions about Zuckerberg as we asked about Corbyn. The results were largely the same.

Q17 What is your perception of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's appearance?

One difference was that hardly anyone found Zuckerberg scruffy. Obviously, the two men don’t dress the same as each other. Corbyn has loosely followed the “suit” style of trousers, jacket and shirt, but they rarely matched and were strangers of the ironing board. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, basically just dresses like an everyday guy in jeans and T-shirt or hoodie, so doesn’t look particularly scruffy, just informal.

There are two important lessons here.

First, being scruffy depends not on the type of the clothes, but on the execution. Badly matching formalwear is less formal than informal clothing such as jeans and a tee.

Second, it probably doesn’t matter anyway. It’s what’s inside that counts, man. That’s not a value judgement on socialism or Facebook – the respondents were probably ambivalent on average – but how well people do their thing and how they dress are not necessarily connected in people’s minds.

Jeans and trainers

There’s surely nothing controversial about wearing jeans and trainers in the workplace? Well, 28% of our respondents found the combo unprofessional, but on the whole the adjectives were on the positive side. Here are the boxes people ticked for the style.

Q7 What is your perception of employees wearing jeans and trainers/sneakers in the workplace?

Ties at interviews: too free, or knot to be?

As if interviews weren’t a weird enough way to judge someone’s competence at a job that doesn’t involve sitting at a table and having questions fired at you, nowadays there’s the thorny issue of the dress code to contend with. If you’re a man, that will inevitably mean The Tie Question. Way back when, it was a no-brainer: you wear a suit and tie to an interview. But today? It’s a brainer.

Even when you know the place of work has an informal dress code, you might feel you want to respect the institution of the interview by tying up. But that could make it look like you’re too stuffy for their office culture. So you go tieless – didn’t you have time to get dressed?

You're probably fine wearing no tie at an interview, although there's still expectation in some quarters that you should. Do your research!

Do you want to know what our survey said? Go open-necked. A clear 57% to 43% majority said you don’t need to wear a tie. If you found out the ages of the interviewers, could we help inform you? Well, it’s probably irrelevant. Apart from the very marginal 35–45-year-old group, all age groups fell comfortably into the open-necked camp. In fact, perhaps the biggest surprise was that it was the over-55s who were most relaxed about ties. They’re obviously sick of them.

Q7 Would you always expect a man to wear a tie to an interview?

Let’s formally end this

Whether you’re already in work or are looking to land that dream job, there’s no question that what you wear and how you look will play heavily on your mind, especially if you want to get on in the company. Our survey confirms what you might already have gathered – that the workplace is a lot less formal than it once was – but it has also revealed that there are still significant pockets of resistance to things that have become ubiquitous, like beards and tattoos.

On the less permanent front, heavy makeup is not particularly well liked, but it is tolerated in some professions more than others. We’ve also learnt that if you want to win votes or create a billion-dollar social network, it almost certainly doesn’t matter what you wear.

And if you’re going for that interview, you can probably get away with not wearing a tie, even if you wear a suit for an employer where everyone wears a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It’s as simple as that.