Throughout history, men’s facial hair has been in and out of fashion. There are cultural and religious reasons people have beards, as well as personal preference, or just sheer lack of desire to shave. Whatever your reason for having a beard, the age-old debate remains - are beards generally clean, or are they Petri dishes?
To find out the answer, we set on a course to deep-dive into the evidence and learned that… there really isn’t much known definitively about the topic (super anticlimactic).
Health-related websites and blogs write about beards being infested with germs, even comparing them to toilet seats. These sites are typically using cherry-picked information that was collected in a faulty manner. However, there are only a few peer-reviewed studies that investigate the potential truth to this.
The largest study comparing pathogenic bacteria between clean-shaven and bearded men involved 408 hospital workers & concluded that there isn’t a significant difference in the number of bad bacteria harbored on facial skin versus in beards. If anything, it showed that clean-shaven men had larger numbers of some bacterial species when compared to those with facial hair. Of note, 52.6% of clean shaven employees were colonized with Staphylococcus aureus (our “Staph infection” bacteria) compared to 41.2% of bearded employees.
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