Penn Badgley’s ‘You’ Beard: A Thorough, Very Important Investigation

It’s the kind of sentence that instantly changes in meaning, depending on when one happens to read it: “Penn Badgley Knows How People Feel About His Beard.”

Read it today, and you might think of words like enamored, or extremely thirsty. This was not the case in 2012, when Netflix’s You star was still turning heads (and inspiring eyerolls) as Dan Humphrey on the CW’s Gossip Girl. Back then, when Vulture published the headline in question, the man who would become Joe Goldberg announced his plan to shave the beard he’d grown during the show’s summer hiatus—both for work, and also because “I know everybody hates it.”

Now, though? A movement has sprouted. The beard craze that had already begun to take hold before Badgley grew out his face badger has now been in full swing for about a decade. It is now perfectly mainstream—and so obvious that it’s actually become boring, in fact!—to say that beards are hot.

For proof, look no further than the internet’s reaction when Badgley unveiled a newly furry face once more in 2020. Twitter was beside itself, and cries naturally followed for Netflix to keep Badgley as beardly as possible in You Season 3. Three years later, that wish has finally come true. But what does it mean that Joe Goldberg has suddenly cultivated a hedgerow on his chin after four seasons? What, one might ask, is the semiotic meaning of this follicular development? Comb through some beard history, and you’ll be amazed how the plot thickens.

Badgley seems to have become something of an avatar for America’s relationship with beards. At least, his face fur has generated a lot of discourse over the years. The media world was apparently obsessed enough with Badgley’s facial hair in 2012 that his decision to shave it off that summer wound up making headlines.

In 2014, The Daily Mail—a publication that’s not exactly known for its tact—derided Badgley’s “wild hair” and “unkempt beard” as “hobo chic.” Two years later, however, the internet was swooning over the aesthetic one-two punch that was Badgley’s bleached-hair-and-beard look. GQ even lauded the style as one of five “Best Grooming Moments of the Week.” (Right underneath… Mel Gibson?!) “Looking rough around the edges keeps the DGAF spirit” intact, the magazine explained. “Will it work on everyone? Definitely not.”

Then came Badgley’s immaculate pandemic beard, a feat of grooming for the gods. It didn’t take long for fans to start begging Netflix to let Joe Goldberg keep Penn Badgley’s signature scruff. Apart from being hot, however, Joe Goldberg’s Season 4 make-over also holds up a fascinating mirror to our continually evolving relationship with beards.

American pop culture has not been friendly toward those with beards—at least, not until recently. Cultural commentator Ekow Eshun wrote in 2012 that the dotcom bust and the “war on terror” had begotten “a more reflective mood” among men, who were growing their beard as they processed the complications of the times into an admiration for all things folksy—craft beer, artisanal everything, that kind of thing.

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In a 2019 The New Republic column, writer and veteran Adrian Bonenberger further argued that our cultural shift toward beards came not just from hipsters, but also thanks to the rise of “tacticool” fashion associated with elite military units—many of which recently gained the right to grow facial hair to blend in while fighting overseas. Before then, Bonenberger wrote, facial hair on screen “was generally reserved for wild enemies foreign and domestic, swarthy terrorists and libertine hippies.” Now, even Captain America has tried out a beard.

It feels appropriate that Joe has grown a beard in You’s fourth season, just as he jets off to London to start a new life as a new man. As Amanda Hess noted in a 2016 Slate review of historian Christopher Oldstone-Moore’s book Of Beards and Men, beards have historically been considered the purview of both the less-than-trustworthy and also the scholarly.

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How appropriate, then, that Joe’s new identity, “Jonathan Moore,” is also a professor! The gesture of stroking one’s beard, it turns out, actually reflects years of rhetoric framing beards as a conduit for and protector of male wisdom. A 2012 study published in the peer-reviewed Oxford University Press journal Behavioral Ecology found that male and female respondents perceived bearded faces as older and belonging to a higher social status.

Joe’s Londoner beard might even help him evade suspicion. A 2021 paper published in the Journal of Business Research found that facial hair increased people’s trust in sales representatives, as well as an increased belief in their expertise. Then again, that 2012 Behavioral Ecology study also found that men who’d been photographed while making aggressive facial expressions received higher aggression ratings when they wore a beard in the photos than when they were clean-shaven.

But the most important reason that Joe’s Season 4 beard works so well is actually so much simpler than any of that. Really, it works because beards are hot—and, in its fourth season, You has finally decided to allow its sexy serial killer character to just be hot.

Maybe it’s because he’s gotten better at talking to people, or maybe the Brits just appreciate Joe’s humor in a way Americans never could. People just seem to be throwing themselves a Joe left and right these days—and you know what? It’s probably the beard! It’s a little scholarly, a little dangerous, and (at least, if you’re Penn Badgley) 100 percent guaranteed to attract some attention. It’s too bad that by the end of the season, Joe has shorn it all off.

Maybe Joe Goldbeard will return, and maybe he won’t. The important thing, however, is that Penn Badgley is on the right side of history. That is to say, he’s Team Beard all the way.

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