It seems that every day there’s another story about why Hipsters are not cool. Today it’s because beards are no longer hip. We have now reached a strange place called ‘peak beard’ according to a new study and it’s all to do with evolution.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia have identified a phemoenon called ‘negative-frequency dependence’ where when something is rare it becomes more attractive and this holds for evolutionary biology. So for instance in the case of the guppy fish we see that they come in all sorts of different patterns. This is because females prefer male guppies that look unusual compared to others, rather than guppies that share common features. So the variations in colour become genetically advantageous. 

The guys behind the study in Australia found that humans display the same ‘negative-frequency dependence’ when it comes to what we think is attractive. They asked over a thousand volunteers to look at photos of men in various states of facial hair growth. What they found was that beards were rated more attractive when they were ‘rare’ in terms of all the photos that they were looking at.

So it seems that humans find what is ‘rare’ to be the most attractive. So the conclusion seems to be that there are too many people with beards for them to be attractive.

Here on Futureproof we take these things very seriously. Our sound technician is Philip Kelly and he currently sports a big beard. We went on the streets with Philip to find out if people thought he was ‘attractive’ with his beard. Tune in this Saturday from 10am to hear what people thought.

Here’s Philip, complete with his mainly mane….