Berenice and Blackbeard

The Face: A Natural History
by Daniel McNeill

(Page 12 of 12)

A treasure frames the upper face: the hair. Some 100,000 strands adorn the head and they give the face a silken backdrop. It is as if the face exists within a fine-grained lushness, beyond ken and faintly fragrant with desire.

A gleaming eye can stir and the teeth can dazzle, but light from hair is subtler. It has a strange, almost bewitching delicacy, and studio photographers use a special spot, the hair light, to emphasize it. Apuleius (c. 2nd cen. a.d.) rhapsodized about women's "beautiful scarf of love" and said that though a lady might deck herself with gold and gems, her striving was doomed without rich, glittery tresses. In John Updike's Brazil, Isabel has "luminous hair, full of many little lights like Rio at night seen from Sugar Loaf." Berenice's Hair, the only constellation named after a body part, is a simple toss of stars, all sparkle. Lambent hair signals health, so prehumans attracted to it likely passed on more genes.

Dark hair is more lustrous than fair. The reason is that when light strikes a strand, part of it bounces back from the outer surface. The rest penetrates the hair and a little more reflects from the far inner surface as well. These rays scatter and interfere with the first reflection. Dark pigment in the hair reduces this effect. Sebum, the oil at the root of the strands, also dulls luster, as does soap-containing shampoo.

Only mammals have hair. Porcupine quills are hair, as is the fine wool of merino sheep and all other fur. Hair has thinned out in our recent evolution. New World monkeys have thicker fur than Old World monkeys, whose pelts in turn are denser than gorillas' and chimps'. Humans seem largely hairless, though in fact we have tiny vellus hairs over most of our bodies.

Aristotle thought hair was excess extruded from the brain, a very rude view of it. Head hair is not only alluring, but protects the scalp against sunburn, insulates the brain, softens blows, and responds to touch. So as hair grew fine and short elsewhere on our bodies, it remained lush on the head.

Rapunzel's blond tresses were 20 ells long, or about 75 feet, and in Gabriel García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons (1994), the coppery hair of Sierva María keeps growing for two centuries after her death. Pulled from her crypt, it too is 75 feet long. Humans have the longest pelts in the animal world, but the record is about ten feet, and most people's won't exceed three.

Yet even that is so long almost everyone cuts it. No other animal does, or can. Scalp hair can reach such length because for eons we've had tools to cut it, another case of technology affecting our genes. Some primitive tribes shear their locks by draping them across a flat rock and running a sharp-edged stone back and forth over them. The stone flakes of Homo habilis and Homo erectus could have cut hair just as well.

Once long hair was possible, why did it actually appear? The answer is unclear, but perhaps after it became alluring, more was more alluring. Certainly women with a luxuriant mane gain magnetism. Puritanical Muslims insist that women cover their hair, and nuns have traditionally hooded it too.

In most mammals, hair grows to a certain length, then halts and remains in place for a long time before falling out. Not in humans. For our head hair, the rule is: Grow or die. When a strand stops growing, it soon falls out and a new hair shaft begins.

The cycle has three phases. In anagen, the hair bulb makes new hair cells constantly and the strand grows. In catagen, the hair is moribund. Growth slows and the base of the hair moves up to the skin surface. In telogen, growth stops. A new hair rises beside the old one and eventually thrusts it out. Then the cycle recommences. At any given moment, about 85 percent of human scalp hair is growing, 1-2 percent slowing down, and 13 percent awaiting ouster.

Hair length depends on the rate of hair formation and the duration of this cycle, which varies over the body. For the down of the arms, it is a few months. For head hairs, which grow about 0.45 millimeter a day or six inches annually, it is four to six years.

This mechanism can change over time, and it does so most famously in male pattern baldness. A bay of skin invades the top of the mane, leaving a wreath-like chevelure around the mid-skull. The strands haven't actually disappeared, but rather wispy vellus hairs have replaced them. Baldness afflicts some people in all ethnic groups, and the Egyptians were trying to cure it as long as 5,000 years ago.

If hair is so useful and desirable, why does baldness occur? We don't know. According to one theory, it conveys age-related dominance. It exposes more cranial skin, so when the face flushes in anger, the display is larger and fiercer. Another theory suggests almost the opposite. As males age, they produce less testosterone and become more nurturing and grandfatherly, a trait which helps pass on genes. In the past, baldness signaled that such men were no longer the rivals of young warriors, and thus spared them physical attacks and made them more effective mentors.

Baldness is a tonsure from the genes, but humans have compelled similar restraints. In 1645, one year after conquering Beijing, the Manchu regent Dorgon ordered all Chinese men to shave their fore-scalps and grow a Manchu-style queue, on pain of death. Many Chinese treasured an elaborate coif as a sign of masculinity, and armed rebellions broke out. Dorgon prevailed, and the custom lasted till the twentieth century.

He had violated a widely accepted human right, even a Samsonish source of power. Longer hair lets us easily change our faces, and indeed hair is the most manipulable body feature. Its possibilities have fascinated people. Powhatan Indians of Vir-ginia shaved the right half of their heads and let hair grow full-length on the left. Samurai cropped two deep coves into their hair. Mohawk Indians of course wore the "mohawk," a strip of hair from brow to nape which, according to a Dutch observer in 1644, "stands right on end like a cock's comb or hog's bristles." The Cherokee and Creeks often flaunted one as well, and some Creeks left an inch-wide cross on their pates.

Today we see initials, designs, and messages carved into the pelt, as well as beehives, brush cuts, ponytails, cornrows, bangs, pageboys, braids, pigtails, dreadlocks, green and orange spikes, a neverending sculptural variety. We put barrettes and combs in hair, and in Congreve's The Way of the World (1700) Millamant pins up her hair with letters-but only those in verse. Indeed, the hair feels like nature's gift to the imagination. We are born with our facial structure, but anyone can reshape the hair.

Beards and mustaches may be the most baffling facial features of all. Historically they have symbolized virility and dignity. Until a few centuries ago, men swore by their beards. Muhammad had a full beard, which he perfumed, and Muslims still take an oath "by the Prophet's beard." Some religions insist on whiskers in male devotees. Hasidic Jews take Leviticus 19:27 literally ("Ye shall not . . . mar the corners of thy beards"), and many Sikhs never cut body hair. For Muslim men, sporting a beard is sunnat: one earns credit for it, but suffers no penalty for abstaining. In at least one Muslim sect, a prayer leader must have a beard. In all these cases, U.S. courts have treated anti-beard policies as infringements on freedom of religion.

As a mark of dignity, the beard naturally invites affronts. When the Patriarch of Constantinople visited Louis XI (1423-1483) and angered him, the French monarch gripped his beard and led him around the room by it. A clutch of colorful phrases, mostly archaic, show the insult potential. "In spite of his beard" is "directly against his will." "To his beard" means to his face, brazenly. "To be in his beard" means to oppose with effrontery. "To put something against his beard" is "to taunt him with it." Drake's 1587 burning of the Spanish fleet at Cadiz was "a singeing of Philip's beard." And of course the modern verb "to beard" means to defy openly.

The abused can respond heartily. After John II and his entourage mocked the beards of Irish chieftains in 1185, they formed an alliance and defeated him in battle. When the Ammonites sheared David's ambassadors, he declared war.

Yet despite their apparent dignity, millions of beards vanish every day under the blade. Indeed, beards are the only part of the face we routinely excise.

Shaving is ancient and primitive tribes use seashells as razors. Folk wisdom to the contrary, severing hair does not accelerate its growth. Yet shaving can cause a medical problem for many blacks and some curly-haired whites. It's known as pseudofolliculitis barbae (PFB), or "beard bumps," and it resembles acne. The tiny beard hairs curl back and reenter the skin. Doctors call such hairs "bucket handles." The simplest cure is to grow a beard. The U.S. Marine Corps, which forbids beards, discharges men with this condition.

To shave or not to shave? Cultures often answer this question for individuals, and beards have ebbed and flowed erratically in fashion. In Nineveh men wore them curled and oiled, and often hardened them with perfumed gum and resin. Persians wove golden threads into them. In ancient Egypt nobles monopolized the beard, and it so symbolized power that Queen Matshrtpdont wore a false one, jeweled and gilded. The ancient Hebrews valued beards as marks of wisdom, and depicted Jehovah, Adam, Noah, and the prophets with lush beards. In the Middle Ages most male saints had whiskers. When Christians depict God, it's usually as an old man with a beard.

The ancient Greeks and their gods wore beards, and Diogenes mockingly asked the shaven, "What sex are you?" In Republican Rome, the smooth chin was likewise considered effeminate, but not in Imperial Rome. Beards helped bifurcate Christianity: Latin priests shaved, Eastern Orthodox priests grew matlike beards. Beards were out of fashion at the time of the Norman Conquest, though both sides wore long mustaches, but the Crusades temporarily revived them. Frederick Barbarossa (1122-1190) was Frederick of the Red Beard, from the Latin barba, beard.

By the early sixteenth century beards had vanished again. Henry VIII (1491-1547) revived the fashion in England. His jowls sported a bushy beard, and he required facial hair of his courtiers as well. By the time of Elizabeth most eminent men had followed suit, including Shakespeare, Cecil, Bacon, Raleigh, and Spenser. Special variants appeared-the Dutch, the Old, the Court, the Italian-and some marked a man's profession. A minister wore a Cathedral, for instance, and a soldier a Spade.

From the mid-seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth, beards were rare in Europe. Voltaire, Newton, Jefferson, Diderot, Washington-all were clean-shaven. Indeed, a furry chinstrap became a mark of eccentricity, or worse. The fanatic preacher Johann Edelmann (1698-1767), "The Notorious," wore a long beard, and when artist Liotard of Geneva grew a beard, it became as famous as his pastels and miniatures. The pirate Blackbeard (Edward Teach, 1680?-1718) had whiskers up to his eyes, we are told. He wove ribbons into this plumage, and according to one historian it "frightened America more than any comet that has appeared there in a long time."

Peter the Great (1672-1725) sheared a nation. When he took the throne, almost all Russian men wore beards, as if still trembling from the words of Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584): "To shave the beard is a sin that the blood of all the martyrs cannot cleanse. It is to deface the image of man created by God." But Peter felt beards showed Russian backwardness, and after his grand tour of Europe he ordered clean chins everywhere. Sometimes he shaved nobles himself, inviting them to a banquet and lathering them up. The shock to Russians was profound, but most complied, and eventually Peter offered resisters an out. For a fee, they could wear a humiliating bronze medallion around their necks that read: "Tax Paid." Beards returned only very slowly to the upper classes, and most Russians remained barefaced till the 1860s and 1870s.

In Western Europe, they began creeping back in the mid-nineteenth century, legitimized by writers like Dickens. The droopy sideburns called muttonchops or dundrearies appeared, along with the walrus mustache, which overhung the lips. European Romantics and Southern colonels in the Civil War sported goatees, and Chopin wore a beard on half his face.

By the fin de siècle, beards were in retreat. In Trilby (1895) the gauche Svengali wears a black, pointed beard, just as they were becoming passé. Every president from Grant through Cleveland had facial hair; since then, only Teddy Roosevelt and Taft have. Beards returned in the sixties as banners of rebellion, outraging the shaven and helping polarize nations.

For a genetic feature, this is a remarkable history. Where is the evolutionary advantage in an item whole societies often erase? Beards are not even universal. They appear only on males, and the jaws of East Asian and Native American men are almost hairless. Why did beards appear at all?

It was probably not to warm us, as they occur in the tropics and not among the arctic Inuit. But they may keep us cooler. British archeologist A. M. W. Porter suggests that, since perspiration works mainly when it evaporates, beards may be sweat-catchers, useful to hunting men but not to women. Porter notes that recent hunter-gatherers like the Bushmen of the Kalahari could chase prey for hours, even days, so those men who could best keep their bodies cool would kill more game and win the nod from natural selection.

Beards first emerge after puberty and thus also indicate sexual maturity. They may send a stronger message. Psychologists Frank Muscarella and Michael Cunningham suggest they proclaim a man's aggressiveness, and thus aid his reproductive success. Since the signal is vaguely unsettling, some cultures suppress it. They can come to view the beard as vile and compelling, a fascinating beast-mark, as in cowboy melodramas of the fifties.

The two scientists propose that beards enlarge the apparent size of the jaw, triggering a response left over from the days when our teeth were weapons. They do bolster "weak" chins and recontour double ones. Yet they hit a slightly different note than large chins, more feral and mysterious. Beards may also work by suggesting the chin-jut, a threat among both humans and chimps.

Do beards attract women? The studies disagree, a fact that further snarls the problem. Hence these theorists suggest beards may boost a man's actual aggressiveness, perhaps by intimidating beardless men, and thus win women indirectly.

Smooth faces arose in monkeys to clarify facial signals. Did beards arise to obscure them? If beards make the lower face less readable, they presumably enhance deceit. In theory, bearded men could negotiate better and utter more credible political lies, and thereby garner more wealth, status, and wives. In turn, we may have evolved to regard them with suspicion and interest.

But ultimately the beard is an enigma, one more marvelous fact about ourselves that we simply don't understand.

© 1998 by Daniel McNeill

About the Author

Daniel McNeill is a bestselling author and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Face. Mr. McNeill is the principal author of Fuzzy Logic, which won the 1992-93 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. He has written numerous other books and articles on high technology, and his work has also appeared in fiction, travel, history, law, and education publications. He lives in Southern California.