The styling of a man’s facial hair, including its deliberate removal, is a component of the self-curated image that he presents. In the long eighteenth-century, a man’s visage signaled his ethnicity, social, or economic status, politics, or military association. Coupled with other elements of his dress, his face communicated his power, or powerlessness, across cultural and geographic borders. A lack of attention to his razor could signify age, poverty, laboring status, or disregard for convention. In this period, to be “clean-shaven” was a deliberate and socially charged act, and the message of a clean-shaven face was as a statement as powerful as Beau Brummel’s trousers. In the last quarter of the eighteenth-century, the “material culture of shaving” came into its own as merchandisers focused on the male consumer, touting efficient cast-steel razors, strops, shaving powders and even self-help texts, to assist him in curating a fashionable image. An individual’s reliance on his neighborhood barber decreased; the increased comfort and effectiveness of straight-edged razors, coupled with an increased focus on self-reliance, encouraged men to self-shave in their own homes. In portraits of the eighteenth-century’s masculine elite, clean-shaveness is nearly universal. But when “regular shaving” might mean twice-weekly, the lack of stubble in portraiture suggests that the degree of “clean-shaveness” was used as an element of presentation; painters incorporated the “language” of presentation to project the social, economic, or political power of their subject. Depicting a sitter with a discernible “shadow” on his jowls also carried an embedded meaning; that shadow of a beard announced the sitter’s virility; it confirmed his ability to be bearded, and his election to be clean-shaven. Throughout history, beards and “beardlessness” are cyclic, but in the long eighteenth century, to ascribe “clean-shaveness” only to the caprice of fashion, ignores the significance of men’s choices regarding facial hair.
About the presenterJacqueline A. Delisle
Jacqueline Delisle, is an attorney, licensed in both Virginia and Maryland. In addition to business and development law, she works with museums on collections policies, donor agreements, etc. She is also an independent researcher in material culture of the Atlantic World, including gender-focused studies on women’s participation in the occupations and trades of the 18th century and the development of razors as a masculine grooming tool.