Of Beards and Men: a compelling, game-changing cultural history of beard

If you think beards are a vibe, Christopher Oldstone-Moore shows in Of Beards and Men they’re really a vote—about masculinity, authority, and who gets to set the rules. “The history of men is literally written on their faces.”

Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair argues that shifts in facial hair aren’t fads but public referendums on manhood—whenever masculinity is redefined, beards and razors change hands.

Oldstone-Moore opens with hard signals: Procter & Gamble warned in early 2014 that rising beard-wear cut demand for Gillette; media from Duck Dynasty to the BBC amplified beard talk; and court rulings such as Kelley v. Johnson show grooming is politically policed.

Best for readers who love cultural history told through a single, vivid thread—beards as a timeline of power, faith, and identity; not for those wanting a how-to grooming manual or a quick listicle of “best beard styles.”

1. Introduction

I came to Of Beards and Men thinking it would be a quirky tour of grooming trends—fun trivia to drop at a barbershop.

Three chapters in, it felt more like a field guide to public power: Alexander orders his troops to shave on September 30, 331 BCE before Gaugamela; Hadrian grows a beard to project Stoic self-mastery; and courts and corporations still legislate chins, from armies to anchor desks. Oldstone-Moore insists these aren’t style cycles but “slower, seismic shifts” that track who defines manliness.

The book—nonfiction cultural history by a Wright State University historian—was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015 . It lays out a long arc: shaving is the Western default punctuated by four great “beard movements,” the first spearheaded by Hadrian.

Oldstone-Moore’s purpose is crisp: demonstrate that facial hair is political language. He states three principles—the face indexes manliness, facial hair is political, and its language rests on shaved vs. unshaved—which become the book’s interpretive engine.

2. Background

I’ve seen writers wave away beards as “hipsters being hipsters,” but the book insists we track material signals: in early 2014, P&G publicly linked weaker Gillette sales to the beard upswing, a claim echoed in mainstream coverage as the shaving market dipped late 2013.

And there are culture-war flashes that prove the stakes—remember the BBC kerfuffle when Jeremy Paxman presented with a beard in 2013? Even his facial hair became headline fodder.

So when Oldstone-Moore says beard history is not fashion history, he means it: court cases, corporate policies, and imperial portraits all testify. “The face is an index of variations in manliness.”

3. Of Beards and Men Summary

I read this book as cultural history that never loses the thread: facial hair is not a fad; it’s a language of power, virtue, and belonging.

Across thirteen chapters, Oldstone-Moore follows how beards (and their removal) mark changing ideals of manliness—from classical heroism to Stoic virtue, from medieval holiness to corporate reliability, and into our plural, postmodern moment where whiskers signal identity work as much as fashion.

“Changing facial hair mirrored competing ideals of manliness,” he writes, and the “razor’s ultimate victory” has had deep consequences.

Highlights at-a-glance

• Leviticus to Late Antiquity: In the Hebrew tradition, keeping beards becomes a sign of purity and devotion—an inversion of older Near Eastern logics where removing hair signified purification. “The Hebrews… declared the preservation of beards… a sign of purity and devotion.”
• 331 BCE — Alexander’s “classic shave”: On September 30, 331 BCE, before Gaugamela, Alexander orders his men to shave; not (the author argues) to prevent beard-grabbing, but to unify the army’s identity with his own smooth-faced, ageless heroism.
• Hellenistic & Roman adoption: The clean-shaven ideal spreads from Macedonia to Mesopotamia; Rome’s statesmen (Scipio, Caesar, Augustus) elevate the shaved face into political iconography.
• 2nd century CE — Hadrian’s Stoic beard (r. 117–138): Rejecting the acne myth and “to look Greek” explanation, Oldstone-Moore shows Hadrian’s beard as a Stoic claim that virtue—self-discipline, judgment—grounds imperial authority; Musonius Rufus and Epictetus provide the beard manifesto.
• Medieval “inner beard”: Western clergy legislate short hair and later the tonsure; shaving becomes a spiritual discipline (816 monastic regulations; 563 council bans long clerical hair; by 721 Pope Gregory II threatens excommunication for long-haired priests). The beard gets relocated to the soul—the “inner beard.”
• Renaissance “beard renaissance” (early 1500s): Popes and princes bring facial hair back; after the 1527 Sack of Rome, Pope Clement VII grows a penitential beard and in 1531 permits priests to grow beards; Pierio Valeriano’s Pro Sacerdotum Barbis (1531) reframes beards as natural, useful, and morally strengthening.
• 19th-century whiskers; early 20th-century clean-shaven turn: 1903 Chicago street count finds 1,236 mustaches, 108 beards, 1,656 clean-shaven in one hour—tipping toward shaving; 1904 Gillette patent rides (doesn’t cause) the trend; germ theory (1907/1909) and employers (railways, police) accelerate the norm.
• Postmodern plurality (late 20th–21st c.): Beard clubs, biker culture, and subcultures use facial hair for community and autonomy; by 2014, even beard-championships split over venues—signaling a crowded, contested beardscape rather than a single “fifth beard movement.”

Extended Summary

Oldstone-Moore begins with first principles: hair is never neutral in the West. In antiquity, hair was “proof of life, divine favor, dignity, and strength,” and losing it (“shaving”) could mark disgrace; the Hebrews invert this by guarding beards as a sign of devotion. The opening sets the pattern the book follows: hair is an index of moral worlds; shaving or not shaving expresses a social virtue.

The “classic shave,” inaugurated by Alexander, is the book’s first hinge. Oldstone-Moore patiently reconstructs the night before Gaugamela (331 BCE): fires of Darius’s vast army, a sacrifice to Phobos, a quiet briefing that “success depended on every man concentrating on his own assignment”—and the razors come out.

Plutarch’s later beard-grabbing explanation gets due skepticism: the more persuasive reading is psychological—Alexander wanted faces to align with his beardless, heroic image and to mark difference from “inferior, bearded Asians.” In one stroke, a personal aesthetic becomes a geopolitical icon.

After victory, Hellenistic and Roman elites canonize the smooth face. Scipio shaves into Alexandrian splendor, Caesar frets over stray body hair, and Augustus of Prima Porta fuses the emperor’s visage with Greek ideal youth. Rome’s shaved face becomes an ideal, “not a fashion statement”—and it takes a philosophical revolt to dislodge it.

Enter Hadrian (r. 117–138) and the first explicit “beard movement.” Against the rumor he hid blemishes or merely wanted to “look Greek,” Oldstone-Moore shows Hadrian absorbing Stoicism in Nicopolis and choosing a beard to broadcast character—“stoic fortitude, self-discipline, and good judgment.”

The book’s richest pages braid philosophy and policy: Musonius Rufus argues the beard is “a protection provided to us by nature… a symbol of the male”; Epictetus exhorts, “Adorn a man, not a woman.” With Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, virtue replaces conqueror-heroics as the facial script of authority.

Late antique turbulence weakens this philosophical consensus; a stubbled severity replaces philosopher’s fullness.

The book then moves into Christian beards, where images of Christ oscillate (bearded and unbearded), but the Latin West innovates something new: holy hairlessness.

Through legislation and liturgy, the Western church makes short hair and then the tonsure into marks of clerical identity (563 council; Pope Gregory I’s moral logic that shaving removes “wandering thoughts”). Oldstone-Moore calls this the rise of the “inner beard”—virtue relocated within, as the external beard is stripped away for clerical men.

By 816, monastic rules require regular shaving; by 886, a stunned Arab traveler reports Romans “young and old” shaving completely; later medieval writers defend clerical beardlessness as spiritual professionalism—an alternative patriarchy.

Church authorities distinguish shaved, celibate professionals from lay nobles, and they police that border: from William of Volpiano’s denunciations to frightening moral tales about lay shavers punished by providence.

Notably, beardlessness remains canonically enforced until 1917, when wearing a beard finally ceases to be an excommunicable offense.

The Renaissance flips the script. Inspired by Italian humanists and artists (Raphael’s famous 1515 portrait of Castiglione; Leonardo’s own whiskers), beards gain prestige; even Pope Julius II vows a battle beard in 1511–12.

The true inflection, however, is 1527: after the Sack of Rome, Clement VII grows a penitential beard, and by 1531 officially permits beards for clergy. Pierio Valeriano’s Pro Sacerdotum Barbis (1531) becomes the Renaissance manifesto: beards are natural and useful (health, weather protection), and a sign of moral strength; the real danger is “excessive refinement and cowardice, easy living and effeminate ways.”

The medieval logic of holy shaving yields to a natural-law logic of masculine authority.

Across the 18th and 19th centuries, ideals rotate again. The book tracks the Victorian bloom—patriarchal whiskers, imperial mustaches—before showing how modernity re-reads the male body: muscles and performance trump symbolic hair.

Oldstone-Moore’s turning-point set piece is 1903 Chicago: a one-hour tally logs 3,000 men—1,236 mustaches, 108 beards, 1,656 clean-shaven—and cultural commentary in Harper’s Weekly concedes that while the beard is “dignified,” shaving brings “gain for honesty.” Gillette’s 1904 patent follows the social tide, it doesn’t cause it; the microbe era (1907/1909) paints mustaches as bacterial nurseries; employers codify clean-cut professionalism (Burlington Railroad 1907; Evanston police orders; 1915 LAPD promotion rules).

Corporate man—young, energetic, dependable—wears a smooth chin.

Heroic shavers (Lawrence of Arabia, Tarzan) make the clean face compatible with toughness; World War I drains the last imperial mustaches of their magic.

By the 20th century, the West rivals the 18th as the most clean-shaven epoch—this time because teams, hygiene, and corporate discipline define manliness. “Clean-shaven” itself becomes shorthand for honesty and sociability.

The closing chapters—“Postmodern Men”— refuse to anoint a fifth grand “beard movement.” Instead, Oldstone-Moore maps plural signals: gay “bears,” biker beards, artisanal communities, and beard clubs that transform facial hair into social glue.

The field is crowded enough to fracture: in 2014, the organizer of Beard Team USA holds a rival “world championship,” splitting from the World Beard and Mustache Association—evidence that contemporary beard culture is vibrant, competitive, and far from unified.

What the book argues

1. Faces speak a moral and political language. In the Greco-Roman world, the shaved face tied common men to heroic ideals; in the Stoic second century, the beard proclaimed virtue; in medieval Latin Christendom, the absence of a beard proclaimed holy professionalism (the “inner beard”) and clerical authority. These are not “style” cycles; they’re regime changes in who defines manliness.
2. Institutions ratify the signals. Rome’s statuary and coinage lock in the classical shave; canon law and councils legislate the clerical look; papal edicts (1531) and printed manifestos (Valeriano) midwife the Renaissance beard; in the 20th century, corporations and police departments codify clean faces as policy, not preference.
3. Data points anchor the narrative. The book is studded with dates and counts—331 BCE Gaugamela; 1511–1531 beard debates at the apex of Christendom; 1903 Chicago’s tally; 1904 Gillette’s patent; 1907/1909 germ-theory fright lines; 1915 LAPD promotions. Each shows how a face reflects—and enforces—collective ideals.
4. Today’s beard boom is real, but not (yet) a “movement.” Oldstone-Moore’s yardstick for “movement” is historically austere: you don’t have one until armies, boardrooms, and law bake it in. Post-2000 pluralism looks more like subcultural autonomy than a wholesale reset of masculine authority—at least so far.

Quotes

• “The revolution… occurred on September 30, 331 BCE… he ordered his men to shave.”
• “This would have had a far greater psychological effect than… protection against grabby Persians.”
• “The beard… should not be shaved from the chin… a protection provided to us by nature.” (Musonius Rufus)
• “Adorn a man, not a woman.” (Epictetus)
• “The shaving of the head… is the cutting off all superfluous thoughts from the mind.” (Gregory the Great)
• “The year 1903 proved to be the tipping point… 3,000 men… 1,236 mustaches… 1,656 clean-shaven.”
• “Clean-shaven neatly sums up these associations.”
• “There is a growing trend in today’s world: beards,” Oldstone-Moore writes, linking P&G’s 2014 report to falling Gillette demand.
• “The face is an index of variations in manliness.”
• “The beard… should not be shaved from the chin… a protection provided to us by nature.” —Musonius Rufus.
• “Adorn a man, not a woman.” —Epictetus, on keeping one’s natural hair.
• “Alexander… ordered his men to shave” before Gaugamela, inaugurating the “classic shave.”
• “Hadrian… reversed four centuries of Greco-Roman tradition and won a victory for the first beard movement.”

Lessons and themes

• Masculinity is administered. From councils to corporate HR, the book shows that faces are governed; a grooming rule is a moral rule by other means—whether for monks (816) or railroad conductors (1907).
• Virtue vocabularies shift. Alexander’s smooth heroism differs from Hadrian’s Stoic gravitas; medieval holiness differs again from Victorian patriarchy and 20th-century corporate reliability. Hair carries each vocabulary visually.
• Technology follows, doesn’t lead. Gillette’s 1904 patent capitalized on a social turn already underway—helping to standardize, not spark, the smooth norm.
• Plural modernities, not one beard future. Today’s whiskers shuttle between authenticity, community, and play—beard clubs, biker rallies, and gay subcultures—suggesting a many-voiced beardscape rather than a single, hegemonic script.

From Leviticus to Gaugamela, from Hadrian to Clement VII, from 1903 Chicago to 2014 beard-club schisms, Oldstone-Moore convinces me that every shave or growth spurt is a public statement about who men must be—and who gets to say so.

Alexander’s shave forged a heroic collective; Stoicism put character on the chin; medieval holy professionals claimed an “inner beard” by scraping away the outer; Renaissance humanists re-naturalized whiskers; and modern employers and scientists sanctified the clean-cut worker. Our century inherits all of it—no single script, but many stages where a face still matters.

That’s the book’s gift: once you’ve seen the language, every jawline reads like a line of history.

4. Of Beards and Men Analysis

Oldstone-Moore’s argument stands up because he ties close reads of images and stories to measurable inflection points—battles, edicts, laws, sales calls.

He begins by building an evolutionary and ancient Near Eastern foundation, then pivots to the classical world where, he argues, Alexander’s order to shave at Gaugamela was a psychological and political gambit, not a tactical anti-beard-grabbing trick.

He cites Plutarch’s famous line—“except to shave the Macedonians’ beards”—but rejects the beard-grabbing explanation; the deeper point, he writes, is that Alexander wanted troops to mirror his smooth-faced icon and mark themselves off from “inferior, bearded” Persians.

That move births the “classic shave,” a four-century Greco-Roman ideal where a cleanshaven face meant rational, heroic rule—until Hadrian upended it with a philosopher’s beard. Oldstone-Moore dismisses the acne rumor and the “he wanted to look Greek” theory; the beard signaled “stoic fortitude, self-discipline, and good judgment,” a visual claim that character—not lineage—grounds authority.

He then reconstructs the Stoic beard program via Musonius Rufus and Epictetus. Musonius’s mini-manifesto—“The beard… should not be shaved from the chin… a protection provided to us by nature… a symbol of the male”—frames shaving as denial of nature; Epictetus hammers the moral charge: “Adorn a man, not a woman.”

These are short passages, but they anchor the book’s claim that beards are ethical speech acts.

He carries the argument through Judaism and Christianity (Leviticus marking beard-keeping as purity practice), through medieval clerical clean-shaving vs. lay beards, through Renaissance revival, and into 19th-century patriarchal whiskers and 20th-century corporate smoothness. The pattern reads like a barometer of power blocs.

Finally, the contemporary chapters on “Postmodern Men” tie in with current data points—shifts in corporate norms and sports—suggesting we’re in a muddled moment rather than a fully formed “fifth beard movement.”

I found this sobriety refreshing: the book refuses hype and insists on institutional uptake (armies, boardrooms, legislatures) as the tell.

5. Strengths and Weaknesses

Oldstone-Moore’s long view lets ordinary objects—razors, portraits, selfies—become arguments, and the prose crackles when he decodes political theater in hair.

At his best, he compresses cultural history into scenes: the orange campfires before Gaugamela; Hadrian stepping into Rome “with a leonine face” after time with Epictetus; Marcus Aurelius in equestrian, bearded calm. As a reader, I felt the stakes because the details date precisely—331 BCE at Gaugamela; 117–138 CE for Hadrian’s reign; 1976 for Kelley v. Johnson—and the quotes are vivid: “The face is an index of variations in manliness.”

Yet, as I turned the last pages, I wanted two things he flags but can’t fully deliver. First, more non-Western depth: he explicitly confines the study to Western Europe and North America, leaving rich comparative work ahead.

Second, more quantified trends post-2010: we get the crucial P&G signal and reportage, but a fuller data section on adoption rates across industries would have paired nicely with his principle that institutions ratify change.

Even so, the strengths vastly outweigh the limits: the book makes you see every beard (or lack thereof) as a claim about the self and the city.

6. Reception

Mainstream reviews underscored how readable yet rigorous this cultural history is. The Independent praised it as “a cultural history for chin-strokers,” noting its playful reach from antiquity to elections.

The University of Chicago Press highlights international praise—Telegraph, Spectator, Esquire, Toronto Star—which collectively celebrate the book’s “long view” and its deft link between images of Christ and beard politics.

Syndicated review roundups capture both the charm and the occasional academic tone: “the language of facial hair is built on the contrast of shaved and unshaved,” one excerpt quips—precisely the line that structures the analysis.

And in wider public discourse, beard controversies such as the BBC’s Paxman-beard moment in 2013 showed the book’s thesis in real time: facial hair still signals authority and “outrage” potential.

7. Comparison with similar works

I’ve read current masculinity writing that rhymes with Oldstone-Moore’s attention to signals—e.g., Probin Islam’s recent Notes on Being a Man review tracks how scripts and symbols shape boys and men in practice; likewise, his piece on Things Fall Apart explores masculinity and power through literature’s lens.

These are different genres (review-essay, not academic history), but they share the book’s core insight: identity is performed, policed, and learned.

Compared with fashion-centric coffee-table books on beards, Of Beards and Men is closer to cultural semiotics—think a companion to histories of clothing or color that decode power language, only here anchored to hair.

And if you’ve followed evolutionary-psych studies on facial hair’s effects (attractiveness, dominance, parenting signals), you’ll find Oldstone-Moore cites those literatures judiciously while bracketing them beneath the social-political superstructure where laws, creeds, and uniforms rule.

8. Of Beards and Men brief

Beard history in this volume moves across thirteen chapters (from “Why Do Men Have Beards?” to “Postmodern Men”), but the through-line is simple and powerful: shaving vs. not-shaving is a language of power.

In the Hellenistic turn, Alexander’s clean shave plus his soldiers’ matching chins announce a new “heroic” ideal; in the second century, Hadrian’s beard—tutored by Stoics—rebrands Roman authority as virtue and self-discipline rather than mythic conquest; medieval Europe splits, with bearded lay elites and clean-shaven clergy.

The Renaissance revives elite whiskers; the 19th century explodes into patriarchal beards; the 20th century’s corporate order shaves again; and post-2000 we get plural styles, with corporate rules slowly loosening but not yet yielding a new “movement.”

For context-hungry readers: the book even steps behind the ancient commandment lines—Leviticus treats beard-keeping as a sign of purity and devotion—which reframes Old Testament debates as body politics before the term existed.

On the contemporary front, the book’s opening data point aligns with coverage outside academia: PBS NewsHour reported P&G’s 2013–2014 shaving slump as beard fashion surged and “Movember” grew mainstream, meaning corporate P&Ls literally tracked whisker growth.

And if you’re scanning media history, the BBC’s 2013 Paxman beard flare-up offers a case study in how a presenter’s face can provoke institutional and public reactions far beyond “style.”

Policies that ban beards are not neutral—they codify one model of manliness (often “corporate rationality”) over others; loosening them can be a low-cost inclusion win with outsized cultural resonance.

If you are teaching ancient history or religious studies, pairing Alexander’s “classic shave” with Hadrian’s Stoic beard visualizes competing virtues: mythic heroism vs. disciplined virtue. Students remember the faces; they then remember the ideas.

9. Conclusion

For general readers and specialists alike, the payoff is practical: after this book, you will never look at a beard—or a razor ad—the same way again.

If you’re a manager rewriting a grooming policy, a journalist assigning on-air standards, a teacher discussing gender performance, or a reader curious about how a chin can carry an empire’s self-image, this belongs on your shelf. It’s accessible yet rigorous, global in implications even as it centers the West, and it leaves you with a testable forecast—no true “new beard era” until soldiers, CEOs, and legislators normalize facial hair.

I recommend Of Beards and Men enthusiastically for anyone who wants to understand how style becomes structure, and how a morning shave is never just between you and your mirror.