Seemingly incidental, men's facial hair signaled a variety of significant differences and masculinities during the Renaissance. In medical, legal, and social terms, the ability to grow a beard was considered a distinctive, exclusive marker of the adult male reproductive body. But that normative structure did not always mean that men did not shave. There were shifts in the practice over time: on the whole, men shaved in the fifteenth century but began to grow beards by the second decade of the sixteenth century, and that habit was maintained until facial hair was replaced by false, sometimes ludicrously abundant, wigs in the late seventeenth century. In some examples of fifteenth-century portraits, stubble or morning shadow was subtly represented in portraits in order to assert the sitter's full masculine virility and identity. By the sixteenth century, for a variety of reasons, groomed beards became fashionable and remained so for some time thereafter. This chapter offers an overview of the meaning of certain differences between facial hair and examines reasons for the adoption of beards, thereby bringing to the fore a consideration of how such personal yet socially recognizable habits resonated with power differences between men.

The visual shift in self-presentation from shaved to fully bearded faces was partly due to the mere vagaries of fashion, which usually cycle back and forth. However, a fashionable trend is more about popularity than change; that is, description of a vogue is not the same as an analytical explanation of its initial cause and subsequent acceptance. Studies that focus on the different styles of beards – as is also done with contemporary beards today – similarly reduce the mode to no more than personal taste and neglect social meanings. I argue, instead, that differences in facial hair were not about styles for their own sake and did not merely indicate the wearer's choice or character, which are modern, superficial criteria about fashion. Today and in yesteryears, facial hair and its meaning depend on such factors as genetics and physiology, health, age, wealth, origin, the pressure of ethnic and national norms, religion, and, at times, occupation, status, or desirability and sexuality.