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What Does a Goatee Say About You?
From Brad Pitt to Chuck Todd to Larry the Cable Guy, all types of men are wearing goatees. Bryan Curtis on the beard for all seasons. Plus, a gallery of A-list whiskers.
Breaking: Brad Pitt has a full-blown goatee. It’s long and gray and bushy, and when Pitt showed it off last week at a movie premiere, it was beaded in a style favored by the pirates of the Caribbean. If there were ever a time to reassess the state of facial hair, this would seem to be it. It used to be that growing a goatee was some kind of fashion statement. Now the goatee has become the Gap T-shirt of beards. The New New Goatee can be worn at home or at the office, by the hip and unhip alike, signifying, well, just about anything.
Click Image to View Our Gallery of Goatees
What does a New New Goatee mean? First you have to understand that the goatee has always been hard to pin down. Shakespeare had one, as did the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck, whom the Van Dyke was named after. (For simplicity’s sake, I have grouped the Van Dyke and the goatee together, even though the Van Dyke is the official name for the lip-chin combo.) “Imagery often shows Pan or the Devil with a goatee,” says Allan Peterkin, the author of One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair. In the 20th century, the goatee was alluring enough to attract Lenin and Buffalo Bill, Burl Ives and Dizzy Gillespie, Colonel Sanders and Malcolm X, Dobie Gillis’ Maynard G. Krebs and Spike Lee, Anthrax’s Scott Ian and Kurt Cobain. It was Cobain and his grunge mates who resurrected the goatee from its Beat obsolescence in the 1990s. Though the goatee retains little of their residue of cool—if you’re at the cutting edge of facial hair, you’re wearing a full Zach Galifianakis—it is oddly more prominent in mainstream American life than ever.
The New New Goatee sometimes symbolizes brainy gravitas. This is most notable in Chuck Todd, NBC’s chief White House correspondent. Todd’s ginger goatee, which he grew in the summer of 2002, is a bracing counterpoint to clean-shaven mugs like Brian Williams’. “It highlights that nobody on TV has facial hair,” Todd says. But those carefully trimmed whiskers are part of Todd’s magic. A veteran of the D.C. insider tip sheet The Hotline, Todd is NBC’s numbers guy, its Election Day stats guru. In the blowhard universe of TV news, Todd’s pronouncements seem to carry real weight—you actually believe he knows what he’s talking about. Todd’s goatee confers upon him the same kind of authority as a political-science professor’s goatee.
Last month, when Todd lost a public bet with ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper and appeared poised to shave off the goatee, blogger Dan Amira compared it to Samson’s locks. Todd made a $2,000 donation to charity and kept the goatee by a whisker.
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These are not all goatees? There certainly are enough real goatees to choose from.
None ofthem are goatees. they are all Van Dykes.
A goatee has no mustache..
Whatever they are they the whole thing including the lips just look something like women's genitalia.
Oh come on! You do a whole article on goatees without looking it up on the wiki and realising that you're really talking about van dykes? Great research team there. There is only one goatee pictured, and Col Sanders could be considered to have one *with* his moustache. All the rest are "Van Dykes"
To be fair, proper journalistic notice of the "Van Dyke" does appear to have been taken:
"First you have to understand that the goatee has always been hard to pin down. Shakespeare had one, as did the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck, whom the Van Dyke was named after. (For simplicity's sake, I have grouped the Van Dyke and the goatee together, even though the Van Dyke is the official name for the lip-chin combo.)"
Van Dyck is in this gallery!
Van Dyke is not wearing a Van Dyke. Both he and Harlan Sanders are sporting then Imperial named for Emperor Napoleon III.
Meh. Call me when they all start wear goat cheese.
Men who want beards grow whole beards, ear to ear. This halfway nonsense is embarrassing.
No, it's a way of having a beard and being able to keep a job other than as a film director, artist, musician, or garbage man. Full beards are still not accepted in most industries. Insurance salesmen are, for the most part, not allowed to have facial hair at all.
They *still* have insurance salesmen?
Old-fashioned thinking. Nowadays a neatly trimmed beard is acceptable in all but CEO and sales jobs.
As someone who has worn a full beard for the last two decades, I firmly believe that the wearer (or, maybe, his wife) should be the one to decide how much facial hair to grow. Since I moved away from the New York City area, I do not believe it has affected my employability, either.
Investigative journalism at its best.
Have you not heard the term "human interest" before? Try finding a news show or newspaper without such stories.
You're absolutely right. I was being boorishly glib, and I do apologize.
Although I confess to being concerned about what manner of human finds this species of "human interest" story interesting, much less insightful.
Hopefully they are not piloting commercial aircraft or engineering buildings in earthquake zones. (I happen to live in one, so this is a major concern of mine).
Reminds me of the scintillating expert analysis of Marcia Clark's trichological permutations during the O.J. Simpson trial. "Well, that's enough about the stab wounds, John. So, what do you think of Marcia's new hairstyle?"
Different strokes for different folks, I 'spect.
In the first place, these are all Van Dyke beards. Like on the Dutch Masters cigar boxes. But Americans ignorantly call these Van Dyke bears "goatees" [sic]. A goatee' is what Americans refer to as a "soul patch". You see, the hair right below the lip growing out like that looks like the hair a goat has. Even Wikipedia is in agreement with me.
Goatees are so ugly. Every time I see a guy with a goatee, I think hick or troll. Or you got some dungeon master with his super long wizard goatee stroking it like he's thinking about something deep, when in reality, he's wondering when his mom is going to kick him out of the basement. Goatees are yucky.
The goatee isn't just "mainstream," it's painfully, awesomely unfashionable. It says 'IT support guy' as much as a cellphone clipped to a belt.
I'm sure most people could get away with a tidy, well-trimmed beard. Insurance salesmen shouldn't need an excuse to start looking for a change of career.
Also: Loonesta is wrong. A goatee is on the chin, a soul patch - the wearing of which, incidentally, ought to be the only act that attracts the death penalty - is below the lip, and a van dyke is the combination of a goatee or soul patch with a moustache. BUT, according to wikipedia the moustache and goatee can't be connected, so these aren't van dycks either. the conclusion we should draw from this complexity, of course, is that EVERYONE CALLS IT A GOATEE AND BEING A WIKIPEDIA-READING PEDANT DOES NOT MAKE YOU SMART.
I always get a chuckle out of articles that purport to spot a new trend. Chin whiskers have been de rigueur in San Diego for three decades, and that's just the women.
The Goatee is just worn by fat men trying to hide their double chin.
Or fat, balding men trying for camouflage as well as to prove they can grow hair elsewhere.
I had a sweet comment where is it. better than these turds debating the difference a goatee and a van dyke.
Freud said that a man with a beard was trying to make his mouth a vagina. I always have that in the back of my mind when I see a man in a beard. The New New Goatee, as you call it (nobody say Van Dyke!), just makes it all the more difficult to look at a man with the Van Dyke Goatee and not see a Playboy spread on his face.
My husband informs me that the New New Van Dyke Goatee is all about practicality since the chin and lip area are the hardest areas to shave. His conclusion is that the newly popular look is all about doing the bare minimum to appear respectable (trust me, he is an expect on just squeaking by with the least amount of effort).
that Freud was on sick cookie. Sometimes a goatee is just a goatee. :)
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LOL!!! We refer to someone with a bad VD-Goatee as "Bearded Clam".
Pitt's is the pitts.
As one poster noted, all but Col. Sanders and Bob Denver on the opening page are neither Van Dykes nor goatees, but Imperials. I've worn all of them over the years, as well as gone bare. It's all about changing it up. But the imperial is my go-to. It is, in fact, slimming and does, in fact, hide my double chin.
14. Men with facial hair have something to hide.
http://rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com/page/49
There is an epidemic of bad facial hair in this country....please; I implore all of you, just SHAVE THEM OFF ALREADY! You do not look cool. No man ever improved his appearance by growing a goatee, Van Dyke or whatever you want to call it. Thanks for letting me vent.
Well, I have a baby's butt on my chin (coverup), and little hair on my head (compensation). A high school teacher, more than once a savvy young whippersnapper has likened me to Lenin. The heck with my teabagging politics...all power to the Soviets!
Used to love it when my dad whiskered me.
Thank you.
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