At the urging of his mother and also the president, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has shaved the much-GIF’d beard he sprouted last month. Carney may have given in to the razor, but more and more public figures seem to be forgoing it: Secretary of State John Kerry, Obama speech writer Cody Keenan and—breaking news alert—New Republic Editor Frank Foer.





Facial hair can radically alter the way a man looks, whether it’s a little stubble or a full-on beard. Carney’s and Kerry’s beards have been endlessly debated on Twitter and blogs—Do they convey authority? Are they hiding secrets?—but psychologists can tell us how we really perceive men with beards, and why men evolved to grow extraneous hair on their faces in the first place.

Why do men have beards?

Beards signal confidence because they’re disadvantageous in fights

In their 1997 book The Handicap Principle, Israeli physiologist Avishag Zahavi and her evolutionary biologist husband Amotz proposed that beards are a costly signal of male competitive ability, since they can easily be grabbed by rivals during fights. According to this theory, a man with a full beard is advertising his confidence in his own fitness: He thinks he can beat his competitors even with the “handicap” of the beard.

Beards advertise men’s health

Following a similar line of reasoning, biologists William Hamilton and Marlene Zuk suggested in a 1982 paper in Science that bearded men are advertising their healthy immune systems: Beards, like other body hair, are a known breeding ground for parasites. Recently, they’ve been shown to host bed bugs and sand fleas.