Men with 10-day Beards Attractive: Study

Guys, if you want women to fall for you, all you have to do is go unshaven for 10 days.

A latest research conducted by the University of New South Wales, Australia, states that women find men with a10-day beard attractive. The study also found that both men and women rate men with beards high in parenting skills.

For the research, 351 women and 177 men (all heterosexual) were surveyed. They were shown faces with different beard growths and were asked to rate them on the basis of attraction, masculinity and health.

"Our findings confirm that beardedness affects judgments of male socio-sexual attributes and suggest that an intermediate level of beardedness is most attractive while full-bearded men may be perceived as better fathers who could protect and invest in offspring," the researchers wrote. They said, "A threshold of density and distribution may be necessary for beards to function as an attractive signal."

However, for clean-shaven looks women gave the lowest points while men rated them just above those who had light beards. Men with 5-days of beard ranked lowest in the study.

Researchers took women's intake of birth control pills and menstrual cycle into consideration, which they thought may influence their choices. But the fertility phase in women had no effect on their thoughts on a man's attractiveness.

In 2008, a U.K. study revealed that women rated men with light beards as tough, masculine, aggressive and ideal romantic partners for short and long-term relationships.

According to a different study, women from two ethnic communities thought that men with beards were more aggressive and a beard denoted a man's age and status.

The study is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.