To beard, or not to beard...

More or less, we all look like our parents. Generally, because of obvious gender reasons, females look more than mom and males like dad (as long as dad is the real dad). This is easily proved when at a Sunday family meeting, your sister has no better idea than to pull out an old and dusty photo album. Once everyone stops sneezing, there's the classic attempt to rebuild the story. The good thing about being a grown up is that we no longer ask "and where was I?": Because you already understand that you still didn't exist.

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Beyond understanding how such gorgeous creatures derived as a product from us, the craziest part of reviewing pictures is that part where we attempt to understand how, with that awful mustache your dad used, did mom accept the process of conceiving us.

Beard, our only weapon. Females have a whole arsenal: Straightening their hair, curling it up, do things to their hair that is totally unknown to us; painting their nails, color their eyes and lips; using high heels, push-up bras, yoga pants, dresses, earrings, rings and even guinea pigs (?).
We, on the other side, can only play around with the distribution of our facial hair to beautify ourselves. A face, a mirror and a shaving machine in a tacit combat against a 3 level locker full of personal care products.
It is an unfair fight, as unfair as the EU organizing an invasion against the Kingdom of Tonga.

Saturday comes, you need to test you luck. Because doing it on a Tuesday at 10 a.m. at a bus stop is just not an option. In there it is too easy. There's no competition, smoke to mask the ugly physical traits, or loud music to mask our lack of conversational skills.
It is a better option to pay a lot of money for have to form a line to go to the bathroom as one recovers from the epileptic stroke the stroboscopic light just triggered.

Party. Get some nice clothes on (because otherwise the anabolics testing ground that acts as flesh door will not let you through into the noise coliseum). But, there's still something that remains unsolved:
You stand in front of the mirror and make a score count. You recall that moment where you went "baby face" and did't succeed in your reproductive simulacrum attempts, but you also recall those moments where went with a Robinson Crusoe style and did..
Results were ambiguous and you don't know what to do. You get mad, because, how is it possible that there's studies about which fleas either cat's or dog's jumps further but none about how sexy a beard is?

Calm down, science comes to the rescue.

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The first thing we need to know is that beard matters, and that we can fine tune it to find company for a night or a whole life. Because it seems like a mild beard, a couple of days old, is more appealing and masculine than a shaved face; while using a woodsman's beard tags you as a potential good father.

This info is great, but it is not all. Because one cannot help heading outdoors and witness baby-face losers and santaclauses winners.
Out there, there's an ocean of styles that come and go in waves fashion dictates, loaded with success and failure. Questioning where we come from and were we are headed to is more existentialist but less pragmatic than wondering if there is a shaving pattern that will allow us to get laid.

Who would've thought that the answer would come from Guppies, some colorful pretty little fishes that follows a genetic evolution known as negative frequency dependency (NFD). What basically happens is that the individuals with stranger patterns are less likely to become lunch of predators, and have better luck with females.
This leads into those fishes with rare patterns reproducing more, then, because of genetic heritage, it becomes a fashion trend... Then, the "old" patterns become rare and start "scoring".

Beard dynamics would work that way. In a study, they grabbed 1600 participants (most, women) and show them pictures of men with 4 different kinds of beards. Each one of them introduced under a different context. For example, they showed them a lot of bearded men's pictures and some pictures of some of them, but shaved. They also tested it in the inverse method.
Clear results: Vanguard scores. Shaved men were considered more attractive when they were displayed in a bearded men environment, while beards where when the context was shaved men.

The concussion is that there's no absolute ruler. Beards follow NFD.
A rare style scores... until it is not rare anymore.

Science never lets you down. Sometimes it may save your life; others, the night. Some other times it shows you that in variety, besides taste, there's evolution.