J.D. Vance has brought facial hair back to the political sphere, in line with his about-face on Trump

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When Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance to be his running mate during the Republican National Convention this week, the Ohio Senator broke two barriers: At 39 years old, he became the first millennial vice-presidential candidate – and the first with a beard in nearly a century.

Mr. Vance’s beard is a recent addition. He was clean-shaven in 2016, when he shot to literary fame with his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which dissected the socioeconomic issues of Appalachia and later came to be seen as a handbook for decoding Mr. Trump’s appeal to middle America. His face was just as baby-smooth during the promotional book tour interviews, when he called himself a Never Trumper and described Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin” for white working-class voters.

Then, when Mr. Vance emerged as a Republican Senate nominee for Ohio in 2022, he was accompanied by a thick, well-groomed beard, which has remained ever since.

Mr. Vance’s chin has fascinated political spectators and pogonophiles – those who love or study beards – because in recent decades the White House has been a facial-hair-free zone.

The last president with any facial hair was William Howard Taft, who was elected in 1908, and the last vice-president was the mustachioed Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s number two from 1929 to 1933. The last significant candidate with any facial hair was presidential hopeful Thomas E. Dewey, who ran and lost in 1944 and 1948. With his Clark Gable-like mustache, Mr. Dewey was called the movie star of candidates, which could make him appear unserious and overly debonair to some voters.

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“He paid a price,” said Christopher Oldstone-Moore, an emeritus lecturer at Wright State University who wrote the book Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair. “There’s at least circumstantial evidence that he lost votes, and maybe even lost the election in part because of his mustache.”

While beards were the norm for politicians in the Victorian era, they lost their appeal as the public became concerned that they were germ traps, capable of spreading tuberculosis. In the political arena, beards became associated with revolutionaries such as Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro, and later terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden, said Allan Peterkin, a professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Toronto and the author of One Thousand Mustaches: A Cultural History of the Mo.

“People have both conscious and unconscious biases about facial hair, so most politicians don’t want to take that chance,” he said.

A 2015 paper by researchers at Oklahoma State University backs this up: they found that men with facial hair are seen as more masculine, and more conservative on feminist issues and that women are less likely to vote for them.

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Mr. Trump is also notoriously averse to facial hair, despite two of his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, both having beards. When Mr. Trump was president, he reportedly rejected John Bolton as secretary of state because of Mr. Bolton’s large mustache. And he has reportedly told Don Jr. he prefers him without any scruff.

But it appears the former president has walked back those beliefs. This week he said Mr. Vance “looks like a young Abraham Lincoln.”

The beard appears to be part of a political rebrand for Mr. Vance, along with his adoption of many of Mr. Trump’s policies, including criticizing aid to Ukraine and backing false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

“The J.D. Vance that denounced Trump was clean-shaven. The J.D. Vance that kisses the ring of Donald Trump is bearded,” Mr. Oldstone-Moore said. “He’s very self-consciously developing an image of himself as a strong individualist, someone who plays by his own rules, someone who’s not business as usual. It’s the same vibe you get from the Trump world.”

Once mainly a staple of lefties, hippies and the counterculture movement, the beard has transformed into a symbol for right-wing Americans, too, Mr. Oldstone-Moore argued. “They both see themselves as opposing the system and being suspicious of authority. The left might think twice about a beard because that symbol has been stolen from them.”

Others chalk up Mr. Vance’s beard as a millennial archetype – a side effect of his being part of a generation that ushered in an era of ironic mustaches and lumberjack-style beards.

Brian Hurson, the owner of Nite Owl Barber Shop in Toronto, has seen how the beard has become less of a statement piece in the past 10 years and more a part of men’s everyday style.

When worn by Mr. Vance on the national stage, though, facial hair sends a message: knowingly or not, he is differentiating himself from his father’s and grandfather’s generations.

“He seems to be leaning into the everyman look. He is intentionally seeking to identify more with their age cohort and convey a common-man aesthetic,” Mr. Hurson said.

So will Mr. Vance’s chin-warmer be a harbinger of a hirsute future for the Oval Office? Mr. Oldstone-Moore isn’t so sure. “It either could be the beginning of the changeover and the arrival of beards in the political world, or a one-off apparition. Only the future will tell.”