Beauty is in the eye of the beard-holder.
The rom-com cliche of a well-stubbled sex machine with a piercing stare might not be far off. A recent study found that bountiful beards and brown eyes are the biggest indicators of whether a man is an assassin in the sack.
The salacious survey, conducted by OnBuy.com, asked 4,550 women to list the physical attributes of men they have had the best sex with, the Sun reported.
Clocking in first was facial hair with a whopping 73% of participants claiming that their best sex partner sported a heavily forested chin.
Meanwhile, 71% of women ranked men with cappuccino peepers as the best in the boudoir.
And, in proof that bad boys finish first (so to speak), men sporting piercings and tattoos came in at 70% and 62%, respectively. Also in the mix were the broad-shouldered at 68%.
Apparently big things do come in small packages as 53% of women claimed that their most skillful lovers boasted small feet.
Meanwhile, heading up the not-so-sexy end of the spectrum were big hands (37%) and bushy eyebrows (36%).
Despite seeming like a rather frivolous finding, the allure of big beards is actually rooted in real science. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology found flowing facial hair to “be more attractive to women when considering long-term [rather] than short-term relationships as they indicate a male’s ability to successfully compete socially with other males for resources.”
And the appeal’s not merely aesthetic. Beards have been shown to help men better absorb blows to their head than the naked chin, leading scientists to deduce that these tough tufts evolved as a result of male-on-male combat.
Perhaps the ironic millennial beard emerged as a mechanism to fool women into thinking we’re the fittest.