Where beards grow, strong feelings follow

As far as beards go, his is more measly than grizzly. For the past several months, Prince William, the shiny-headed British royal, has been fostering a modest bit of scruff. The heir to the British throne debuted the beard in August, with an Instagram post congratulating Team Britain on their success at the Olympics. At that time the growth was slight, as if he had forgotten his razor over a long weekend, the strands barely connecting with his sideburns.

That version of the Prince’s patchy beard didn’t last. As he told People magazine in November, he shaved at the behest of his daughter, Princess Charlotte, who was reported to have fallen into “floods of tears” at the sight of her father’s new look.

But this past week the beard was back — fuller, if only just so — as William served Christmas lunch at a charity organization in London and attended the reopening of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris over the weekend.

At the latter event, the Prince’s appearance received high marks from at least one world leader. “He’s a good looking guy. He looked really, very handsome last night,” President-elect Donald Trump told the New York Post. That publication’s gossip arm, Page Six, referred to the beard as “rugged,” though that’s likely overselling the Prince’s subdued scruff.

“It’s just there,” said Alun Withey, a senior lecturer of history at the University of Exeter and the author of “Concerning Beards: Facial Hair, Health and Practice in England, 1650-1900.” “It’s not cut into any style.” As to why the royal would be compelled to grow a beard at all, Allan Peterkin, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and the author of “One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair,” offered that William finds himself at an inflection point in both his personal life and his royal trajectory.

"He’s just putting a strong masculine face forward,” said Peterkin, who assessed the fledgling beard to be “a wee bit scruffy.” William, 42, is a father of three and is next in line to the British throne. The beard could thus be a tool to help him appear more distinguished and blur the public perception of him as a rosy-cheeked child clutching his mother’s hand.

“He’s saying, I am stepping into to my full role as a man, and maybe I don’t want you thinking so much of my little boy face,” Peterkin said. “What you see is a fully grown, mature man ready to wear the crown.” Withey offered that William “is not doing anything particularly unusual,” as there is a long history of British monarchs growing beards.

In the early 20th century, King George V cultivated a curlicue mustache and bushy chops that could still make one of Brooklyn’s $200-a-cut barbers weak at the knees. Decades later, William’s father, King Charles III, sported a robust, reddish beard in his 20s that made him appear like a young Jim Henson.

According to Prince Harry’s 2023 memoir, “Spare,” the younger royal’s conspicuous beard ignited a rift between the brothers. Harry, the book recalls, was given permission to keep his fiery scruff for his 2018 royal wedding to Meghan Markle.

“Maybe it was Freudian — beard as security blanket. Maybe it was Jungian — beard as mask,” Harry wrote. “Whatever, it made me calmer, and I wanted to feel as calm as possible on the day of my wedding.”

If the beard soothed Harry, it ruffled his brother. Per the book, the elder royal “became livid,” as he had previously been told that he was not allowed to keep his own beard. The book did not specify who demanded the beard be shorn.

The beard may have stoked a battle between brothers, but beyond the grounds of Windsor Castle facial hair is no longer the cultural signifier that it once was.

“Many men his age across the Western world wear beards, so it’s a norm for his age cohort,” Peterkin said of William. Beards are neither an offramp from polite society as it was for hippies in the ’60s, nor a knowing flourish of pretentious hipsterdom as it was in the aughts.

Today, the beard is banal. LeBron James has one, as does George Clooney and Jimmy Kimmel. David Letterman’s Father Time retirement beard is entering its second decade of existence. Even executives can forgo their razors without fear of being ousted by their boards. The salt-and-pepper beard of Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the slight scruff of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff are striking, though less so than the Rasputin shock that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has cultivated.

Beards have even outlasted being a political penalty. In some ways, the rising face of America’s Republican Party is a bearded one. The incoming vice president, JD Vance, with his well-manicured sweep of a beard, was the first major party nominee to have facial hair in 75 years. Given Vance’s tendency to make outrageous claims on the campaign trail, including that immigrants were eating pets, his facial hair was the least of what voters had to tangle with. Similarly, both Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. sport beards worthy of the term rugged.

If the beard has any power left to shock — or at least provide fodder for social media scrutiny — it’s when it first sprouts. This month, Jacob Elordi, the squeaky cleanshaven star of “Priscilla,” surfaced at a film festival with a fresh chin-cloaking beard. He looked like a bank robber on the lam, or the drummer of a stomp-clap folk-rock band. The internet seemed to agree that the 27-year-old Australian actor was doing himself a disservice by hiding his good looks behind the beard.

Still, for both Elordi and William, it’s perhaps less the beard itself that people are reacting to than these public figures not looking how the public is accustomed to seeing them. We’re reacting to the shock of the new, not to the shock of the scruff.

“Beards are commonplace and normal, but we still talk about it when somebody famous decides to radically change their face and grow one,” Peterkin said.

If William chooses to keep the beard, people will eventually get used to it. The royal could even, as Withey predicted, spark a trend for scraggly beards. “We’ll give it a name,” he said. “That would be the Prince William style of beard.”