As promised, this article is a return to whimsy after my rather dark AI article a couple weeks ago, because it’s important to have fun. Besides, I’d like to see an AI spend two weeks trying to answer the question “are beards Republican-coded now?”
I had a lot of fun chatting with on his podcast which you can check out here. We talked about how people who start out making business media often evolve into psychological or even spiritual topics.
When I was 15, I read a Sports Illustrated article seeking Tom Brady’s advice on how to be cool. This was back in 2007, when he still ate nightshades:
The interview began with some faux modesty:
You want me to help guys be cool? Why me? I was the little sports nerd in high school who hardly ever had a girlfriend!
A “sports nerd?”
Anyway, it continued with some weirdly intense manospheric dating advice (emphasis mine):
Dates? "Whatever you do, keep 'em short. You can't let them know you're that interested. I try to get this across to my best friend. He's really into this girl, but I keep telling him she's got to leave that date thinking, What's wrong with me?"
But the thing that has stuck in my mind about the article is Brady’s blasé response to a question about his facial hair:
O.K., but how about a few secrets? How do we get that Clooney stubble?
"This?" he says, rubbing his cheeks. "I just hate to shave."
This did not seem fair to 15 year-old Joe, who had no stubble to speak of.
A few years later, I read some article like this one about the rise of beards depressing Gillette’s sales; this line must have been particularly fun to write:
Over the medium to long term, the desire for an unshaven look is expected to continue, especially in Western Europe where increasing unemployment coupled with stubble being in vogue will continue to damage growth of razors and blades.
This cultural context combined to cement the idea of “facial hair = cool” in my brain for a long time.
But these days, Tom Brady’s face is much smoother and a good deal more skeletal, and I’ve realized that at some point I stopped thinking of beards as “cool.”
I suppose it’s just the pendulum of fashion. Things that are abnormal become cool when the right people embrace them, then everyone embraces them, and they’re no longer abnormal and no longer cool. Skinny jeans, ankle socks, catholicism, etc. etc.
But I wanted to close the loop for high school Joe and understand where we are in the beard aesthetic supercycle.
Are beards still cool?
We can start by looking at search interest for beard-related terms, where there’s been particular softness in New York in the past 2 years:
To me, this reflects a course correction back to putting effort into your appearance after the sweatpants-and-scruff malaise of the pandemic. It may even have a tinge of the embrace of the American Psycho 80s yuppie aesthetic. But I might be too online.
Beard trimmer search interest is a rough measure of popular appetite for facial hair. To get a sense of the preferences of an ostensibly more stylish subset, I took a look at the GQ cover archives:
I covered many of the awful / terrifying things about AI in my last article. But one fun thing is that it is now quite trivial to tag a few hundred GQ cover images with the model’s facial hair style; see for example the output for this 2016 cover image of Kendrick Lamar:
Running this on all of the male cover model images since 2010, we can see some interesting patterns emerge:
The share of models with facial hair increased throughout the 2010s, as I would expect; 2019 was the apex of the full beard, with Keanu Reeves a good example:
Then in the post-covid era we started to see more clean-shaven models: This cool one of a smoke-shrouded1 Travis Scott, or this one of Cillian Murphy trying to be Keith Richards. Even Brad Pitt and George Clooney show up clean-shaven to promote their hilariously bad Apple TV movie “Wolfs.”
It feels to me like this post-facial hair era was kicked off in 2020 when Timmy was photographed sitting on a rock in a stream in Woodstock with a very smooth face and really cool red boots:
But now here we are in 2025, and beards appear to be back!? Ben Affleck and Brad Pitt are both sporting thick beards; Novak Djokovic and Michael B Jordan are quite scruffy.
So now I don’t know what to think. And of course last night, right before this went to press, the undeniably cool New York mayoral candidate / bearded heartthrob Zohran Mamdani won the democratic primary; one has to assume that will be a tailwind to beard growth in Bushwick for a few quarters at least?
Facial hair and political affiliation
Zohran’s win brings me to my final note: The question “are beards Republican-coded now?” somehow got stuck in my head, possibly because of the current Vice President, whose beard coats his otherwise infant-like features2. It’s also just a very funny phrase, and I wanted to see if it had any basis in reality.
Basically, the answer is: no, not really.
I analyzed the most recent Google image of each male senator, and 18% of male Democratic senators had some facial hair, compared to 14% of Republicans. There also wasn’t a correlation between a state’s political leaning and its growth in search traffic for beard trimmers; even if NYC is buying fewer of them the guys out in Colorado have a bottomless appetite for beard accessories.
All this to say, I really don’t know if beards are cool or not. Someone who is more attuned to fashion please weigh in. Like Tom Brady in ‘07, I’ve had some level of scruff for about 10 years, and mostly it’s because… I hate to shave.
Semi-solicited book recs
, whose writing on consumer & tech I really like, recently asked what I was reading; this is of course the best possible question because my recommendations are almost always unsolicited.I know very little about Iran and I have found All the Shah’s Men to be a really engaging history of modern Iran and particularly the CIA-led coup in the 1950s. I am now 3 for 3 on books called “All the ____’s Men”: All the President’s Men is the extremely fun tale of the Watergate intrigue, and All the King’s Men is somehow both an incredible political novel and so gorgeously written.
Giovanni’s Room was beautiful and Down and Out in Paris and London is really entertaining; both are set in the poverty of mid-1900s Paris and made me really thankful to live in the time and place I do, despite our problems.
It’s been a bit since I read it but a character in Down and Out reminded me a lot of The Goldfinch, which is lovely and sad and a good summer read.
Finally, if you want to learn write one of these books, my friend Andrew (you should read his latest novel Hope) is now offering writing workshops and 1-1 consultations3, bringing a fancy MFA program “direct-to-consumer,” if you will. He also got an instagram about a month ago and it is like a baby deer learning to walk, which is fun to follow along.
Pictures of people shrouded in smoke are never not cool. If you smoke cigarettes and stand around staring out into the water at Battery Park, there’s a decent chance I’ve tried to take a picture of you
In doing this I unfortunately saw a recent photo of Ted Cruz, which was unpleasant, and I was reminded that he has a beard now too.
Get a free glass of amaro when you tell Andrew I sent you
The degree to which Mamdani pulls off a beard should inspire countless copycats
this is fantastic. it's bona fide anthropology!
i think we need to expand the study to rural and urban perceptions of beards, how beards are perceived in higher vs lower income zip codes, and so forth
i believe this is the first work in Hirsute Studies
but in all seriousness, this is really interesting.