“You should write a blog post about the health benefits of beards,” my boss said. He meant it as a kind of joke, but I was finishing up my contract and my replacement was already in place. I had a few hours to kill on my way out so I did the preliminary research, hitting google with the obvious search term and checking the information already out there.
Dear god, there was a lot.
And if you listen to the internet, beards did have health benefits that were worth paying attention too. There were blog posts. There were newspaper articles. Beards were big business on the internet at that point, the epitome of hipster cool, and everyone had a listicle or informative article out there. Beards were good for your health, motherfucker. The fix was fucking in. 8 Health Benefits of Growing a Beard. 14 Ways A Beard is Good For Your Health.
Because I’m me and I dislike taking this stuff at face value – and because the gig usually involved getting shit fact-checked by experts – I started digging into the claims. Going back through the evidence cited in each post, looking for the primary sources. Noted the proliferation of newspaper articles in 2013, just after some Queensland scientists published a paper about beards offering some small protection against UV radiation (albeit in a limited area, and far less than say…sunscreen? A good shirt with a tight cotton weave?).
Noted another proliferation – Beards Protect Against Infection! – based upon a paper about bacterial ecology of hospital workers facial hair, in which a small number of bacteria were marginally more.
Large numbers of the blog posts referred back to the news articles written as these papers were released. Only a handful of those news articles actually linked to the original research, and few provided enough context to understand what it meant in the field of scientific research. Scientists have proved is dangerous language in science writing, ’cause scientists don’t prove shit. They find evidence that supports or disproves a hypothesis, allowing for the possibility that it will be disproved when new information comes to light, and it takes an overwhelming amount of research before things start to approach consensus.
It was fascinating to watch how one experiment – basically the early research, filling a niche that no-one else had filled yet – proliferated into internet certainty: Beards protected you from skin cancer; Beards helped filter bacteria.
In the early part of the twenty-first century, digging for primary sources is becoming a goddamn survival trait.
