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Health

01st Dec 2019

Men with beards have more germs than dogs, study finds

Jade Hayden

Dump your boyfriend, get a dog.

Some lads have beards. Some lads don’t have beards. Some lads would like to have a beard but can’t grow one and that’s OK too.

No matter where you fall on the facial hair scale, we don’t judge. Your face is your own and you should be able to decorate it (?) whatever way you so please.

However, if that decoration involves the presence of thousands of tiny, curly, fluffy hairs, you’re going to need to wash them regularly.

Like, really regularly.

Like, whenever you’re washing the hair on your head because that shit is getting just as much exposure to dirt, germs, and nastiness and it needs to be cleaned.

Because bearded men officially carry more germs than dogs – and yet the dog is the one that you won’t let sleep beside you on the cold, lonely, winter nights.

men's beards

The Mail on Sunday reports that researchers from Hirslanden Clinic in Switzerland took swabs from the beards of 18 men and found that all of them contained bacteria.

Similarly, they then tested the necks of 30 dogs. Just 23 of them returned results in line with that of the bearded men.

Conclusion? Pets are better than men. You heard if here first.

What’s more is that seven of beards tested were so dirty that they actually could have caused harm to a human being’s health.

Nasty.

“Our study shows that bearded men harbor a significantly higher burden of microbes and more human-pathogenic strains than dogs,” Andreas Gutzeit told the publication.

“On the basis of these findings, dogs can be considered as clean compared with bearded men.”

There a couple of reasons for this.

The first is that beards are generally curly as opposed to dogs that have a variation of coats, meaning that the hair of the beard is far more likely to trap dirt.

The second is that dogs get a good, deep wash regularly because they are always assumed to be filthy. Beards, on the other hand, not so much.