Fun facts about beard

When you say beard, jolly old Santa Claus's full beard immediately pops into my head. But aside from his white cloud of beard, popular culture icons sport memorable beard styles such as Hugh Jackman's character as Wolverine in X-Men appeared with a rugged sideburns or the savvy character of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.

As per Merriam-Webster dictionary, the beard is a hair that grows on a man's face often excluding the mustache. In Wikipedia, it is a collection of hair that grows on the chin, upper lip, cheeks and neck of human beings.

We are used to men sporting this bristly appendage, but in some rare cases, women with hirsutism may also develop a beard. Hirsutism is an excessive growth of hair on women in those parts of the body where terminal hair doesn't appear like a beard or chest hair.

So it is not strange that the longest beard on a woman recorded in the Guinness World Records belongs to Vivian Wheeler of United States of America. It was measured at 25.5 cm (10.04 in) from the follicle to the tip of hair on the set of Lo Show Dei Record, Milan, Italy, on 8 April 2011.

For the Guinness World  Records' longest beard on living male belong to Sarwan Singh of Surrey, Canada. It measures 2.37 m (7 ft 9 in). The beard was measured on the set of Lo Show dei Record in Rome, Italy, on 4 March 2010.

Sarwan Singh holds the longest beard on living male

One of the fun facts about beard that I stumbled upon is that the longest beard ever recorded was grown by Hans Langseth. The beard is now preserved at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, according to this site.

For more interesting facts about beard, visit this website.