Despite lacking the expertise of a barber and the longevity of a 130-year lifespan, Dwight E Robinson managed to compile a comprehensive report on the fluctuations of men’s facial hair between 1842 and 1972 in London. Robinson, a business professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, utilized the Illustrated London News, a popular publication during that time, as an indirect source for his study. He titled his report "Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of the Illustrated London News, 1842-1972," which was published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1976.
Robinson employed a technique developed by Jane Richardson and AL Kroeber to measure the yearly alterations in various aspects of women’s clothing, such as skirt length and waistlines, as ratios to their height. For his study, Robinson used a "head count" method that involved determining the comparative frequencies of five major features of men’s grooming: sideburns, sideburns with a mustache, beards, mustache alone, and being clean-shaven. He included all men appearing in the publications, excluding group shots, royalty, advertisements, and non-European men.
One of Robinson’s most noteworthy findings revealed a steady increase in clean-shaven men from 1885 until the present. In contrast, sideburns saw a decline until about 1920, when they began to appear less frequently. Beards, too, hit their bottom in 1920, but had short periods of popularity throughout the years. In 1921, moustaches reached their zenith, with nearly 60% of the men pictured in the Illustrated London News sporting them. They continued to dominate throughout the years.
An interesting graph that Robinson produced depicted rising and falling waves over a 115-year period, showing the relationship between the width of women’s skirts in proportion to their height, and the prevalence of beards among men. The skirt-width-ratio wave began 21 years before the beard wave. Robinson concluded that "men are just as subject to fashion’s influence as women."
A study conducted by Nigel Barber twenty-five years after Robinson’s analysis yielded further insights into men’s facial hair. Barber discovered that men tend to shave their moustaches during weak marriage markets, possibly to create an impression of trustworthiness.
