Beard vs Stubble: What the Studies Found

On beard vs stubble, the research gives a narrow answer: heavy stubble, about ten days of growth, was rated a little more attractive than a full beard, and mostly by women. Men rated the two about the same. A full beard scored higher for looking healthy and like a good father. In the first study, the style women rated lowest was not the beard or even the clean shave. It was light stubble, the five-day shadow, which in our chair is about a grade half.

What the two studies actually tested

Most "women prefer stubble" headlines come from one research group at the University of New South Wales.

In 2013 Barnaby Dixson and Robert Brooks photographed ten men four ways: clean shaven, five days of growth, ten days of growth, and a full beard. They showed the photos to 351 women and 177 men and asked them to rate each face. Women rated heavy stubble the most attractive, with the full beard, the light stubble and the clean shave all scoring lower. The full beard did better on how healthy the men looked and how good a parent they seemed than it did on looks. The study was published in Evolution and Human Behavior, and there is a plain-English write-up from NPR.

In 2014 the same group ran it bigger, online, with 36 men photographed and 1,453 women and 213 men rating them. Heavy stubble again beat the full beard overall, and this time the clean shave came last with everyone. Women put both kinds of stubble above the beard. Men put the beard above light stubble but not above heavy stubble. You can read that paper in full, and it is short.

Before you shave anything off on the strength of this, three things worth knowing. These were photos on a screen, rated by strangers, not a face across a table. The differences between the top styles were small. And the second study found something more interesting than the ranking.

Rarity moved the scores

In the 2014 study, some people saw a run of faces where beards were rare, and others saw a run where clean-shaven faces were rare. When beards were rare, beards and heavy stubble both scored higher. When clean shaves were rare, clean shaves scored higher. The ranking never flipped completely, but whatever was unusual got a boost.

That is the most useful finding in either paper, because it is about the room you are standing in. If every man in your office has a full beard, yours is doing less for you than it would somewhere it stood out. If you are the only one with one, the reverse. Nobody can tell you which room you are in better than you can.

Heavy stubble is a grade one, and it does not stay one

Here is the part the studies cannot tell you, because they photographed each man once.

Scalp hair adds roughly a centimetre a month, which is 0.3mm and a bit each day. If your beard keeps the same pace, ten days of it is a little over 3mm. That is a grade one, the 3mm guard. Five days is nearer 1.5mm, which is a grade half. So if you keep your stubble on the shortest comb your trimmer came with, there is a fair chance you are wearing the length women rated lowest in the first study, not the one that came out narrowly on top in both.

The bigger problem is that heavy stubble is a moment, not a style. It is ten days long on day ten and thirteen days long on day thirteen. To hold it you have to take it back to the same guard every three or four days, and that is home work, not a barber job. A full beard is the other way round: it can go two or three weeks between trims and still look like the beard you chose.

So the honest trade is this. Stubble costs you ten minutes with a trimmer twice a week, forever. A beard costs you a week three where most abandoned beards get abandoned, then a trim every few weeks.

Your growth decides more than the research

Both studies used men who could grow a full beard. Plenty of men cannot, or not evenly.

If your cheeks come in thin, stubble is the kinder choice. At 3mm a thin patch reads as a slightly lighter shadow. Let it grow to beard length and the same patch becomes a visible gap with longer hair either side of it. There is a full rundown of what to do with each kind of patchy growth, and for many men it settles the beard vs stubble question before looks come into it.

The reverse is true too. If your beard grows dense and fast, stubble can look like a shadow you forgot to deal with by the second day, because a heavy grower is past heavy stubble almost as soon as he has trimmed back to it. Men like that often get on better with a short boxed beard at a 2 or a 3, which buys a fortnight.

Whichever you pick, the edges do most of the work. Stubble with a cut-in neckline and a clean cheek line reads as chosen. The same length with a neckline creeping down the throat reads as a missed shave. Where those lines go is the same on stubble as on a full beard, and we have mapped them here.

If you want to try both

Grow it first. You can always cut a beard back to stubble in fifteen minutes; you cannot go the other way faster than your face grows.

Give it four weeks, then come in and have it shaped as a proper beard. Live with that for a couple of weeks. If it is not for you, we take it down to a grade one with the lines cut in, and you have seen both on your own face rather than on someone in a study. Each of those visits is our £11, fifteen-minute beard trim, or £9 on top of a haircut, so the experiment costs you two trims.

When you sit down, tell us which you are leaning towards and how much time you will really give it at home. That second answer matters more than the first.