Yesterday we brought you a story about how people’s beards are just as dirty as toilets, meaning they’re covered in poop particles and having a beard is like walking around in public with a turd strapped under your chin. I’m a girl so I can’t grow a beard, but I’m going to assume this knowledge deterred some men from growing out their chinny-chin-chin hairs for at least a split second, because unless you’re one of the chicks from the 2 Girls 1 Cup video, there’s no reason to want shit caked all over your face.
Well if you were one of those guys who decided to put off growing a beard out of fear of having poop particles in and around your mouth, today is your lucky day! Apparently that “study” was a giant load of crap.
As Nick Evershed at the Guardian helpfully points out, the “results” aren’t from an actual scientific study. Instead, a TV news anchor took a handful of swabs from random dudes’ beards and talked to a single microbiologist about what he cultured from them.
And then bacterial fearmongering set in, with outlets making the leap from the detection of gut bacteria to the detection of poo bacteria to the dangerous and gross presence of fecal matter.
The problem with this is that bacteria known to associate poop is not necessarily literal poop. In fact it’s probably not. And saying that something is gross for being covered in bacteria is pretty ridiculous, because anything that exists in our physical realm is definitely going to be covered in bacteria.(Via)
In other words, poop is everywhere. It’s on your hands, your face, in your food and probably swimmin’ around in your stomach too. No matter where you go or what you do you’ll never escape it, so you may as well grow a beard. As the Washington Post says,
But unless you’ve put it there intentionally, you almost certainly don’t have poop on your face. No matter how thick your beard is.
Unless you’re Batman, of course.
[H/T Washington Post]