Have You Noticed the Beards on All Those Stylish Men? They've Turned Into an Increasingly Profitable Business

And, it's said, a backlash against effeminate fashion

"You might be surprised that the guy with the giant beard sitting over there isn't a homeless man — he's Best Actor nominee Casey Affleck," host Jimmy Kimmel joked to the audience at this year's just-finished Oscars. Kimmel was wearing a full beard himself, only a little shorter than the one on Affleck, who went on to win Best Actor.

And it wasn't only Affleck and Kimmel. Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans also turned up bearded rather than clean-shaven.

On this year's list of the 100 sexiest men, voted on by 80,000 readers of Glamour, more than half had beards — and so did eight of the top ten, among them Jamie Dornan, star of Fifty Shades of Grey; Aidan Turner, lead of the British series Poldark; and Robert Pattinson of the Twilight films.

Is the beard back? Some of the numbers say yes.

A recent survey by the market research firm Simmons Research finds that more and more men are growing beards. Today 39% of American men have facial hair — 20% of them never shave at all — a figure 15% higher than five years ago.

In Britain, Captain Fawcett, a men's grooming brand founded in 1997, spent years as a steady business. Over the past four years it has grown fast: according to figures the company gave QDaily, it has held annual growth as high as 40%.

That has brought at least two changes to a men's grooming market that used to be quiet. One is that beard care has become a fast-growing niche of its own, with beard oils, beard gels, beard creams, beard combs, beard waxes and beard soaps multiplying. The other is that the razor market is slowing: revenue growth in the U.S. razor market fell to 2.4% last year, the third straight year of slowdown, and the trend is not expected to reverse before 2020. Western Europe is no better — razor sales have fallen every year since 2014 and are not expected to turn around before 2019.

A 2015 Euromonitor report points the same way: sales of U.S. men's grooming products — including beard balms, beard oils, beard washes and beard conditioners — reached $3.4 billion, up 4%, while shaving products grew at half that rate.

"I believe trends are cyclical," Alfredo Ortiz Catedral wrote in an email to QDaily. He founded the beard-care brand Brooklyn Grooming in Brooklyn in 2012. "It isn't only the creative, artistic atmosphere of Brooklyn that inspired us — we want people to remember, and enjoy, the traditional Victorian way of treating a beard."

Alfredo himself can't say whether he pushed this retro trend along or simply went along with it. The one thing he is sure of is that he has benefited from it. Similar small companies have sprung up everywhere. Beardbrand, an American beard-care e-commerce brand also founded in 2012, used content marketing to lift its monthly revenue to $120,000 in under a year. Lames et Tradition, a small French brand aimed at working professionals whose flagship product is a natural beard oil, turned a profit in its first year, 2015. Big Wood Beard Combs, an American brand born in 2015 around a single product, the beard comb, has since been pulled by the market into making a whole range of beard accessories…

The founders of these new brands are beard devotees themselves. They wear bold, dramatic beards, and they want their brands to lead the trend. On its website, Beardbrand's founder writes that the idea came to him after he took part in the West Coast Beard & Mustache Championships in Portland in 2012.

Small companies are not the only ones to have caught the new fashion. The big ones have moved in too.

The fashion label Tom Ford launched a beard-care line in 2014, and over the past two years its beard oil has turned up regularly on grooming lists in fashion magazines and beauty blogs. L'Oréal, which entered men's skincare as early as 2004, added 15 men's grooming products in 2013; its beard moisturizer has done well, rating above 4 out of 5 on Amazon.

On Instagram and Twitter, hashtags such as #beardgang and #beardgods have taken off, with roughly 5 million photos between them, and expert advice on shaping a beard is everywhere on social media.

More and more men's cheeks are growing thick with hair, and Captain Fawcett excitedly calls this market — one it has worked in for 20 years — "booming." Last year the company teamed up with Ricki Hall, the much-talked-about bearded model, and this July it plans to publish a book, The Quintessential Grooming Guide for the Modern Gentlemen, in the United States, Britain and Europe; the publishing deal is done.

"The boundaries of culture, gender and class are all becoming more fluid, and when the world changes this fast and the future is this uncertain, the pull of the past becomes especially strong," is how Captain Fawcett reads the retro wave. "For the modern gentleman a beard is part of his interests — and it is how he shows himself to the world."

For men, a beard has never been only about looks. It carries a deep social and cultural meaning.

Go back far enough and the beard was a symbol of power: in ancient Egypt only the pharaoh was allowed one. In the 1830s and 1840s it got tangled up with Europe's socialists. A young man named Friedrich Engels — the same one who would later draft The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx — organized a gathering among friends called "Mustache Evening," mocking the "vulgar habits" of the clean-shaven bourgeoisie. Marx himself wore a thick, flourishing beard.

From the 1830s to the 1880s, as the gold rush minted overnight fortunes, the beard became standard equipment for the bourgeoisie. The financier Jay Gould, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and the railroad baron William Henry Vanderbilt all grew one.

According to The New York Times, the full beard effectively became the mark of a middle-class man. Advocates of the new "beard movement" argued that "the tyranny that forbids the beard is a despotism of effeminate fashion," leaving the world full of "men with women's faces."

Then workers around the world rose in revolt, and radicals grew long, unkempt beards to signal their defiance of capitalism. Respectable men, capitalists included, began to avoid the look, switching to carefully trimmed mustaches or giving up facial hair altogether.

So the beard has cycled back and forth between the political left and the capitalists, standing in turn for wealth or for power. That still carries weight now: research by the Australian psychologists Barnaby Dixson and Paul Vasey found that bearded men are read as more aggressive and more powerful, whether in a modern society like New Zealand or a tribal one like Samoa.

As the facial feature that most sets men apart from women, the beard leaves a similar impression on women. Psychologists at Northumbria University in Britain found that women tend to see bearded men as more aggressive, more masculine and older — and, probably as the sum of those three, as higher in social status.

In short, a beard reads as masculine appeal. In modern life it attaches more to labels like fashionable, mature and stylish, which is probably why Hollywood has taken to it.

The beard's recent return also has something to do with the revival of the slicked-back pompadour. That cut was everywhere from the 1930s to the 1950s, a favorite of rockabilly singers, and later caught on with upper-class gentlemen as a mark of success. It is simple to keep up: shave the sides short, grow the hair on top and comb it straight back, then set it with pomade or wax — retro and sharp at once.

Murdock, the upmarket British barbershop, noticed the beard-and-pompadour combination catching on in East London around 2006, and the fashion spread quickly. Alex Glover, a senior barber at Murdock, told QDaily that tailors on Savile Row, the menswear designer Patrick Grant, the Hollywood stars Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling (lead of La La Land) and the star football managers Andre Villas-Boas and Pep Guardiola have all grown beards. The beard is no longer a mask to hide behind; it has become a sign of a man's taste and of his professional identity.

So Murdock set up a club, the Better Beard Club, whose members wear all kinds of elaborate beards and trade tips on growing them at events online and off. A whisky cocktail party held for the club's launch pushed Murdock's own beard-care line, the Beard Care Collection, straight into the market. The beard moisturizer in that line won Best New Beard Grooming Product at the seventh GQ Grooming Awards, and the pH-balanced beard wash and beard conditioner are now popular Murdock products too.

Murdock also invented a three-step beard routine, using beard shampoo, beard serum and beard oil. In-store beard services come in roughly three kinds: the most popular is a 15-minute trim plus aftercare, for men who wear a beard every day; a full beard design and trim takes 30 minutes; and a traditional straight-razor shave with hot towels takes 45.

Barbershops offering this kind of service have opened in Shanghai as well. Five years ago, when Anna Elliott left Britain for Shanghai, she already thought this was where things were heading; in 2015 she opened Doc Guthrie's. Dylan Byrne, another of the founders, told QDaily: "We don't take women, and we don't do trendy styles either. We only do the old-school classics."

"People's taste is changing, and the retro look is winning more acceptance," says Henry. "Grooming your face is a way of letting others know who you are, and this pursuit of tradition is also a pursuit of a finer way of living." He owns another retro barbershop in Shanghai, I Muse Barbershop, which has offered this kind of service since 2008; it takes both men and women, though it has set aside an area just for men.

Unlike ordinary barbershops, both places have plenty of foreign customers — when a QDaily reporter came in to interview them, nearly everyone in the shop was a foreigner. Still, Henry says 30% of I Muse Barbershop's customers are foreign, and Anna Elliott puts the figure at 40% for Doc Guthrie's. Both mentioned that while East Asian men, for physical reasons, don't grow beards as thick and don't wear them as often as Westerners do, the number of Chinese customers coming in is rising.

This may also have to do with people dressing more casually and with workplace dress codes loosening. "At work people accept facial hair more than they used to — few employers ask staff to shave every day," says Gabriela Elani, a personal-care analyst at Mintel.

Anna Elliott says firms in the creative and internet industries are relaxed about beards. Those offices don't demand suits, ties and a clean-shaven face the way law firms and banks do; casual but presentable clothes and grooming will do. A fair number of her customers work in those fields.

Tech bosses are pushing the trend too. Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff are two of the more conspicuous examples — enough for The New York Times to declare that the full beard is back in business.

Oddly enough, many people blame the end of the full beard on King C. Gillette, who invented the safety razor in 1901 — and Gillette has indeed ruled the razor market ever since. In manual razors it has ranked first for years, with more than 70% of the market, an outright monopoly.

But an announcement last Thursday by Procter & Gamble chief financial officer Jon Moeller shows how serious a challenge Gillette faces. Moeller said Gillette products would start cutting prices, by as much as 20%, in order to fill the wide gap between expensive and cheap products before more rivals move in. "We'll make pricing adjustments quickly to make sure our brands show up at every point on the price ladder," Moeller said.

Gillette's share has already fallen to 59%. New brands such as Harry's and Dollar Shave Club have grown inside a shrinking market on the strength of fair prices and easy subscriptions.

Dollar Shave Club is the sharpest example. It went live in April 2011, launched a subscription costing a few dollars a month in March 2012, and released an ad starring its own chief executive, "Our Blades Are F**king Great." The ad spread far beyond anyone's expectations, drawing more than 20 million views on YouTube; the company's servers reportedly went down for an hour under the traffic, and it took 12,000 orders in two days.

In the three years that followed it signed up more than 32 million subscribers, 20% of them women, and in July 2015 it pushed past the old razor brand Schick into second place in market share, at 10%. Its 2016 sales were expected to be ten times its 2013 figure.

So when Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion last July, the deal was read as a challenge to Procter & Gamble. It is also credited with setting off the move to online subscriptions among razor brands. The Wall Street Journal reports that online razor sales are expected to grow 25% a year over the next five years.

Even with its shrinking share, Gillette's products still sit near the top of the sales charts: leaving aside private labels, Gillette took six of the nine best-selling products of 2016. The growth figures look worse. While sales of other private-label brands rose 38.9%, almost every one of Gillette's famous products fell. The exception was the Mach3, its long-running best seller, which jumped 69% — probably because the company gave it its first technical upgrade in about a decade.

Men are taking more care with their appearance. Elodie Bohuon, a beauty buyer at the British department store Selfridges, says the fastest-growing men's category is skincare, followed by beard and shaving products. Figures from the American investment research firm Trefis put global sales of men's grooming products, beard products included, at $17.3 billion in 2012, with $22.6 billion forecast for this year.

A new market is taking shape. As it does, the competition sharpens. Handmade, natural materials, made locally — every brand has landed on the same selling points, and the logos and packaging are all steeped in the same retro sameness. Even the photos they post on Instagram look nearly identical.

Men getting fussier about how they look is, on the whole, a good thing.

Graphics by Feng Xiuxia

Images in this article were provided by the companies interviewed or taken from their official websites and fashion-magazine sites such as Esquire.

Cover image from Fortune