Beards May Have Helped Win the Patriots the Super Bowl, But Could They Help Win Over the Ladies?
Beards have been big recently – both in the news and on men’s faces.
Patriots fans should be pretty happy about that, since the players’s beards may have been responsible for the team’s Super Bowl win.
In November, West Coast Shaving wrote about a recent study that found an interesting trend regarding the facial hair of NFL players. No, not the trend where men dye their beards crazy colors (though one pink beard in particular may have helped them win some games), but a direct correlation between facial hair and football performance.
According to the study, six top rated quarterbacks — including Tom Brady — played consistently better when sporting some kind of scruff, with ratings ranging from 6-to-16 points higher with facial hair than without. The Patriots top the category for NFL teams with the most five o’clock shadows.
Just because the Pats play at Gillette Stadium doesn’t mean they’re required to stay clean-shaven. But the company, headquartered in Boston, recently teamed up with Tinder to see if smooth-faced guys got more Tinder matches than their bearded brethren.
After following 100,000 anonymous, college-aged, male Tinder users, the companies found that 74 percent of all right swipes – the way one says they like someone in the app – went to clean-shaven men.
To go further into the eternal bearded vs. non-bearded debate, Gillette and Tinder took users who had facial hair and asked them to use the app in the exact same way, one week with a beard and then one week without, requiring them to upload a new photo showing their fresh face.
The experiment found that the men saw a 19 percent average increase in right-swipes once shaved. Nearly a quarter of the guys got an increase of at least 60 percent.
Would this apply to Julian Edelman if he had stayed on Tinder?
Well, a contrasting study just came out claiming beards make you more attractive. Published in the official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, it indicated that having certain types of facial hair helps how other people perceive you.
Both men and women rated heavy stubble as the “most attractive’’(hey Patriots) though guys liked how a full beard looks too.
A full beard makes men and women think that person is healthier than someone without any facial hair, and that they’d make a better parent, according to the study. The perception of a man’s masculinity showed to increase with the amount of facial hair he has.
There are even health benefits to having a beard, according to researchers from the University of Southern Queensland. Beards are able to block up to 95 percent of the sun’s harmful UV rays.
Good things come to those who don’t shave, unless you’re trying to get a date on Tinder — but who’s taking Tinder seriously anyway?
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