10 Strange But True Facts About Beards, Facial Hair And Shaving
[0:00:00] Did you know that the hair on your face is
on average four times thicker than the hair on your head.
Guys, in today’s video, I’ve got ten strange, but true fact when it comes to shaving any
facial hair.
[Music] Fact number one, men and women have about
the number of hair follicles on their face.
Now, the reason men grow beards and women don’t is because the hair follicles on a
man’s jaw are stimulated by the hormone dihydrotestosterone.
Next up, the average man with a beard has 30,000 hairs on his face, most of them are
going to be concentrated on the upper lip and the chin.
The average man’s facial hair grows at a rate at half an inch a month.
So, this next one I found really interesting that drinking alcohol can really speed up
the growth of your facial hair.
Now, the reason apparently is the [didotestosterone] that DHT, there is something in alcohol that
basically converts it into the hormone that speeds up the growth of hair.
So, most of the information we found on this did not specify the type of alcohol except
in one case where they talked about beer.
And, apparently beer improves that circulation.
I didn’t exactly understand how they were able to show this, but apparently beer can
help with beard growth.
Speaking of beards, let’s talk about the beard taxes 1698.
So, Peter the Great he’s trying to modernize Russia, he institutes this really tough beard
tax where if you’re walking to a town, the police can stop you and say, “Hey, do you
have your token?”
If you didn’t have a token and you didn’t pay the beard tax, you are going to get publicly
shamed and they will get rid of your beard right there.
So now, let me give you some crazy dates to think about.
Men have been shaving and plucking their beard hair since 30,000 BC and they find clam shells,
they find sharks teeth, they find flint razors.
And, let’s talk about plucking because that’s what those clam shells were for.
Apparently, men had been plucking their beards for thousands of years.
Guys, like Julius Caesar actually apparently preferred it.
I don’t know, for me, sounds incredibly painful.
I’m going to skip I’m plucking my beard.
29,600 years, that’s how long the straight razor has ruled.
In various forms from copper to bronze to gold, the straight razor has had the longest
reign.
Now, the first safety razor was invented in 1762 and for that safety razor basically just
covered up most of the blade so that you wouldn’t have as deep of a cut exposed less and therefore
do less damage and therefore do less damage.
So, the strange thing to me here is the way our terminology has changed.
This is now what we call a cartridge razor and we recognize that the cartridge the head
of it comes right off, so that’s a cartridge razor in our definition.
But, technically what we call safety razors were initially called cartridge razors.
So, the electric razor invented in 1928.
It’s been around about ninety years.
The disposable razor made popular in the 1960’s, it’s been around for about sixty years.
The point is, there hasn’t been much innovation in shaving for almost fifty years that is
until OneBlade, guys, the paid sponsor of today’s video and I need to point out over
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So, the next strange facial hair fact is that militaries around the world and police departments
seem to ban beards.
Why?
Oftentimes, the reason said is because in a fight in a scuffle, you don’t want to
have something that somebody can grab.
But in the 1930’s, the military actually banned beards because you have to be able
to get a good seal whenever you put on a face mask.
Now, this next fact is about the spelling myths.
Whenever you shave, your hair does not grow back thicker.
It appears to grow back more coarse because actually you have cut the follicle.
Now, the end of a hair follicle, what we see is it actually is thinner than at the base.
Next up, let’s talk about eyebrows, a bit of facial hair that most people don’t even
think about and very few people actually know both reasons why we actually have eyebrows
and what they’re used for.
[0:05:08] Now, some of you guys know reason number one,
it’s about protection.
So, eyebrows are going to keep the sun out of your eyes, whenever you sweat, they’re
going to keep the sweat beaded over to the sides.
But, the second reason very few people know about this and that is eyebrows help you express
yourself.
So, when you’re looking across and you’re upset, you notice how you can see the eyebrows
move and that is a big part in us being able to communicate with other human beings and
why this facial hair is here.
The next strange fact about beards, shaving, and facial hair is that it is the biggest
fashion that men have fallen into for thousands of years.
Many of us have recognized, you know, the hipster trend recently, but if you go back
throughout history, this has happened again and again.
You see US presidents.
Just look at who was bearded, who was not, and how it moves up and down.
So, the next strange fact about facial hair is that beard-growing contests are apparently
huge.
They had one in Texas back in 2017 and they had seven hundred and thirty eight competitors
from thirty three countries in twenty seven categories for both men and women.
Now, apparently this contest only happens every two years, so you have time to grow
the beard.
But, this is serious business.
And next time, it’s in Europe.
So, the next strange facial hair fact is that apparently beards cannot commit treason.
So, we go back to 1533, Sir Thomas More, he decides I’m not going to attend the coronation
of Anne Boleyn.
She says, “You know what?
I’m going to take her head.”
And he talks to the executioner, he points out, “Hey, my beard has committed no crime,
can we please spare my beard.”
And the executioner agrees, they actually moved his beard out of the way and they cut
off his head cleanly without cutting the beard.
The next strange fact about facial hair is that human beings are not the only ones that
have facial hair.
Let’s look at the animal kingdom.
So, we look at lions and the obvious one, we all know about the king of the jungle,
but we also see it with the bearded emperor tamarin.
Let’s look at the highland cattle out of Scotland, the lion-tailed macaque.
And did you know that orangutans are apparently the only other ape that can grow a beard.
So, another strange facial hair fact is the story behind Fidel Castro’s beard.
Apparently, before the revolution, he was clean-shaven, after the revolution, he grew
a beard.
When asked why, the story was, hey, I’m going to save fifteen minutes a day, that’s
ten days out of the year that I could devote to being a better revolutionary.
Now, that’s a nice story for creating a good communist legend, but apparently when
Barbara Walters interviewed him, she asked the question and it just came down to, oh,
well, my favorite razor is coming in from the US, we no longer got them, so I stopped
shaving.
So, at this point, you’ve got some very interesting facial hair knowledge, but do
you actually know how to go through the perfect shave?
Guys, check out this video right here How To Shave Perfectly, the seven steps process
you need to go from preparing to actually getting the perfect shave.
But it does help when you’ve got an amazing tools.
And, guys, I’ve had OneBlade’s Hybrid blade now for over a couple of months.
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I’ve gotten a lot of great shaves out of it.
And, the Genesis, this is where it all started.
I’ve had this one for now almost two years.
Guys, a great company making an amazing product.
They put a lot into the engineering into building the perfect tool to give you the perfect shave.
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Check them out in the description.
[Bleeping sound] Another person who liked the tax beards, Queen
Elizabeth I.
Apparently, if you had more than two weeks of growth, she would tax it.
My thing is how can they tell if it’s two weeks of growth, I mean for one guy, you know,
two weeks isn’t that much, for another guy, it’s a heck of a lot.
I mean how did they do that?
One of those mysteries we will never figure out.
[Music] [0:08:40] End of Audio