Tag Archives: hair

BigBang

Man-With-Beard and Negative Frequency-Dependent Sexual Selection

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Culture watchers pronounced “peak beard” around the time of the US Academy Awards in 2013.  Since then celebrities (male) of all stripes and colors have been ditching the hairy chin for a more clean-shaven look. While, I have no interest in the amount or type of stubble on George Clooney’s face, the beard/no-beard debate does raise a more fascinating issue with profound evolutionary consequences. Research shows that certain physical characteristics, including facial hair, become more appealing when they are rare. The converse is also true: certain traits are less appealing when common. Furthermore, studies of social signalling and mating preference in various animals shows the same bias. So, men, if you’re trying to attract the attention of a potential mate it’s time to think more seriously about negative frequency-dependent sexual selection and ditch the conforming hirsute hipster look for something else. Here’s an idea: just be yourself instead of following the herd. Though, I do still like Manuel’s gallic mustache.

From the BBC:

The ebb and flow of men’s beard fashions may be guided by Darwinian selection, according to a new study.

The more beards there are, the less attractive they become – giving clean-shaven men a competitive advantage, say scientists in Sydney, Australia.

When “peak beard” frequency is reached, the pendulum swings back toward lesser-bristled chins – a trend we may be witnessing now, the scientists say.

Their study has been published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

In the experiment, women and men were asked to rate different faces with “four standard levels of beardedness”.

Both beards and clean-shaven faces became more appealing when they were rare.

The pattern mirrors an evolutionary phenomenon – “negative frequency-dependent sexual selection”, or to put it more simply “an advantage to rare traits”.

The bright colours of male guppies vary by this force – which is driven by females’ changing preferences.

Scientists at the University of New South Wales decided to test this hypothesis for men’s facial hair – recruiting volunteers on their Facebook site, The Sex Lab.

“Big thick beards are back with an absolute vengeance and so we thought underlying this fashion, one of the dynamics that might be important is this idea of negative frequency dependence,” said Prof Rob Brooks, one of the study’s authors.

“The idea is that perhaps people start copying the George Clooneys and the Joaquin Phoenixs and start wearing those beards, but then when more and more people get onto the bandwagon the value of being on the bandwagon diminishes, so that might be why we’ve hit ‘peak beard’.”

“Peak beard” was the climax of the trend for beards in professions not naturally associated with a bristly chin – bankers, film stars, and even footballers began sporting facial hair.

Read the entire story here.

Video courtesy of Fawlty Towers / BBC Productions.

tD

The Absurdly Insane Exceptionalism of the American Political System

Some examples of recent American political exceptionalism: Dan Quayle, SuperPACs, Sarah Palin, Iran-Contra, Watergate, Michele Bachmann. But, just when you thought the United States’ political system could not possibly sink any lower along comes someone so truly exceptional that it becomes our duty to listen and watch… and gasp.

You see, contained solely within this one person we now have an unrivaled collection of inspirational leadership traits: racist, sexist, misogynist, demagogue, bigot, bully, narcissist, buffoon and crass loudmouth. A demonstration of all that is exceptional about the United States, and an exceptional next commander-in-chief for our modern age.

Trump-on-twitterImage courtesy of someone with a much-needed sense of humor during these dark times.

 

 

Idea Soup

Peak Beard

google-search-beards

Followers of all things hirsute, particularly male facial hair have recently declared “peak beard”. The declaration means that it’s no longer cool to be bearded (if you’re a man, anyway), since being bearded no longer represents a small, and hence very hip, minority. Does this mean our friends over a Duck Dynasty will have to don a clean-shaven look to maintain their ratings? Time will tell.

From the Guardian:

Hirsute men have been warned their attractiveness to potential partners may fade as facial hair becomes more prevalent, in a scenario researchers have called “peak beard”.

Research conducted by the University of NSW finds that, when people are confronted by a succession of bearded men, clean-shaven men become more attractive to them.

This process also works in reverse, with men with heavy stubble and full, Ned Kelly-style beards judged more attractive when present in a sea of hairless visages.

Researchers picked 1,453 bisexual or heterosexual women and 213 heterosexual men to take part in the study.

Participants were shown 36 images of men’s faces, with the first 24 pictures used to condition the subjects by showing them exclusively bearded or non-bearded men, or a mixture of the two.

The final 12 images then showed clean shaven or bearded men, with the participants ranking their attractiveness on a scale of minus four to four.

Researchers found the ranking of these men strongly depended upon the exposure of participants to bearded men prior to this. The more beards they’d already seen, the less attractive subsequent beards were, and vice versa with clean-shaven men.

This phenomenon is called “negative frequency-dependent sexual selection” and is present in several animal species, according to the UNSW team.

Researcher Robert Brooks told Guardian Australia the aim of the work was to look at the dynamics that drove the fashion of beards.

“There is a lot of faddishness with beards, they are on the way back and it’s interesting to look at that interaction with culture,” he said.

“It appears that beards gain an advantage when rare, but when they are in fashion and common, they are declared trendy and that attractiveness is over.”

Brooks conceded it was hard to tell how the experiment related to the real world, but said the fashion for beards might be reaching its zenith.

“The bigger the trend gets, the weaker the preference for beards and the tide will go out again,” he said. “We may well be at peak beard. Obviously, you will see more beards in Surry Hills than in Bondi, but I think we are near saturation point. This thing can’t get much bigger.

“These trends usually move in 30-year cycles from when they are first noticed but, with the internet, things are moving a lot faster.”

The researchers are now working on a larger, follow-up study that will look at the link between facial hair and masculinity.

“We still don’t really know the primary function of the beard,” Brooks said. “Some women are attracted to it, some are repelled. It is clear it is a sign of manliness, it makes men look older and also more aggressive. How much women like that depends, in a way, on how overtly masculine they like their men.

Read the entire article hair (pun intended).

Image: Men with beards. Courtesy of Google Search.

Idea Soup

Teasie Weasie, Vidal and Bob

A new BBC documentary chronicles the influence of flamboyant sixties hairstylist Raymond Bessone, better known as Raymond “Teasie Weasie”. He was the first stylist to appear on television, and is credited with inventing the modern bouffant and innovating with hair color. He also trained Vidal Sassoon, who later created the bob.

From the Guardian:

From the beehive to the afro and the footballer’s perm, a new BBC documentary celebrates the nation’s love of a flamboyant hairstyle – the bigger the better.

…

Possibly the most famous haircut of the 1960s, the asymmetric bob created by Vidal Sassoon in 1963 liberated a generation of women from the need for a weekly appointment and a session under the hood-dryer. With these sharp, swinging styles, the blowdry was born. This cut is by Roger Thompson, a stylist at Sassoon’s salon.

See more images hair[sic] or check out a preview of the documentary here.

Image: Cover of the 1976 paperback book “Raymond – The outrageous autobiography of Teasie-Weasie”. Courtesy of Raymond Bessone/ Wyndham Publications / Wikipedia.

Image: Bob cut. Courtesy of Vic Singh/Rex.

Idea Soup

Power and Baldness

Since behavioral scientists and psychologists first began roaming the globe we have come to know how and (sometimes) why visual appearance is so important in human interactions. Of course, anecdotally, humans have known this for thousands of years — that image is everything. After all it, was not Mary Kay or L’Oreal who brought us make-up but the ancient Egyptians. Yet, it is still fascinating to see how markedly the perception of an individual can change with a basic alteration, and only at the surface. Witness the profound difference in characteristics that we project onto a male with male pattern baldness (wimp) when he shaves his head (tough guy). And, of course, corporations can now assign a monetary value to the shaven look. As for comb-overs, well that is another topic entirely.

[div class=attrib]From the Wall Street Journal:[end-div]

Up for a promotion? If you’re a man, you might want to get out the clippers.

Men with shaved heads are perceived to be more masculine, dominant and, in some cases, to have greater leadership potential than those with longer locks or with thinning hair, according to a recent study out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

That may explain why the power-buzz look has caught on among business leaders in recent years. Venture capitalist and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, 41 years old, DreamWorks Animation Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, 61, and Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeffrey Bezos, 48, all sport some variant of the close-cropped look.

Some executives say the style makes them appear younger—or at least, makes their age less evident—and gives them more confidence than a comb-over or monk-like pate.

“I’m not saying that shaving your head makes you successful, but it starts the conversation that you’ve done something active,” says tech entrepreneur and writer Seth Godin, 52, who has embraced the bare look for two decades. “These are people who decide to own what they have, as opposed to trying to pretend to be something else.”

Wharton management lecturer Albert Mannes conducted three experiments to test peoples’ perceptions of men with shaved heads. In one of the experiments, he showed 344 subjects photos of the same men in two versions: one showing the man with hair and the other showing him with his hair digitally removed, so his head appears shaved.

In all three tests, the subjects reported finding the men with shaved heads as more dominant than their hirsute counterparts. In one test, men with shorn heads were even perceived as an inch taller and about 13% stronger than those with fuller manes. The paper, “Shorn Scalps and Perceptions of Male Dominance,” was published online, and will be included in a coming issue of journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The study found that men with thinning hair were viewed as the least attractive and powerful of the bunch, a finding that tracks with other studies showing that people perceive men with typical male-pattern baldness—which affects roughly 35 million Americans—as older and less attractive. For those men, the solution could be as cheap and simple as a shave.

According to Wharton’s Dr. Mannes—who says he was inspired to conduct the research after noticing that people treated him more deferentially when he shaved off his own thinning hair—head shavers may seem powerful because the look is associated with hypermasculine images, such as the military, professional athletes and Hollywood action heroes like Bruce Willis. (Male-pattern baldness, by contrast, conjures images of “Seinfeld” character George Costanza.)

New York image consultant Julie Rath advises her clients to get closely cropped when they start thinning up top. “There’s something really strong, powerful and confident about laying it all bare,” she says, describing the thinning or combed-over look as “kind of shlumpy.”

The look is catching on. A 2010 study from razor maker Gillette, a unit of Procter & Gamble Co., found that 13% of respondents said they shaved their heads, citing reasons as varied as fashion, sports and already thinning hair, according to a company spokesman. HeadBlade Inc., which sells head-shaving accessories, says revenues have grown 30% a year in the past decade.

Shaving his head gave 60-year-old Stephen Carley, CEO of restaurant chain Red Robin Gourmet Burgers Inc., a confidence boost when he was working among 20-somethings at tech start-ups in the 1990s. With his thinning hair shorn, “I didn’t feel like the grandfather in the office anymore.” He adds that the look gave him “the impression that it was much harder to figure out how old I was.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Comb-over patent, 1977. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]