Saturday Morning Beard Fact

By the time the Crimean War came to an end in 1856, the face of British men had changed irrevocably. As regiments of heavily bearded men began to be sent home, the beard became recognised as the sign of a hero. Before the War, beards had tended to signify that the wearer was overly religious, or a working-class labourer, or a tramp or a lunatic. After the War, beards were considered the height of masculinity.

Remarkably rapidly, British men laid down their razors and abandoned their barbers in favour of growing facial hair as bushy and manly as that on the faces of returned soldiers. Within a decade, those men who did not – or could not – grow a beard, or at least substantial whiskers, were beginning to be viewed with something akin to suspicion.

Source: Moustaches, Whiskers & Beards, Lucinda Hawksley