Katharina Buczek
After hitting that coveted growth spurt around the time of middle school, young men typically look forward to the development of one specific feature: facial hair.
Whether or not you choose to rock a beard now, you probably yearned for one at some point. For many, beards mark that they’ve “become a man.”
But this once-coveted look might set you up for some hygiene-related criticism now. According to a study published in 2019, beards could actually harbor more germs than the fur of dogs.
Scientists at the Hirslanden Clinic near Zurich, Switzerland, aimed to find out if using the same MRI scanner for both humans and dogs was hygienic.
In order to assess this, they compared the bacterial load in terms of colony-forming units (CFU) of human-pathogenic microorganisms, analyzing samples from 18 men with beards and 30 dogs with fur.
The study also involved comparing the level of bacterial contamination in an MRI scanner shared by dogs and humans to that in two other MRI scanners used solely by humans.
The results? Men with beards had high microbial counts, in contrast to just 23 out of the 30 dogs. Moreover, seven of the bearded men actually had such high levels of beard bacteria that they were at risk of illness.
“On the basis of these findings, dogs can be considered as clean, compared with bearded men,” said Andreas Gutzeit, the study’s author.
This perhaps shocking discovery caused some beard defenders to crack comments and cast doubts about the research.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
