Not long ago, Zach Slovin’s appearance might have gotten him the bum’s rush from any respectable job interview. A copywriter at ad firm Grey North America, Slovin interviewed for his current position wearing “a large wild-man beard with handlebar mustache.”
As it was, Slovin not only landed the job, he figures the Paul Bunyan look may have given him an edge.
“I launched a personal marketing campaign that said I wasn’t going to shave without a job,” says Slovin, who printed business cards that along with his particulars included the boldfaced line “No shaving until employment.”
“It really helped people remember me,” he says.
While conventional wisdom has long held that sporting facial hair is a good way to get rejected at interviews, snubbed for promotions and even fired, city workplaces are becoming tolerant of chin shag that once would’ve been laughed out of a conference room.
“Five years ago, if you had a beard, it meant you were either on vacation or you didn’t have a very good job,” says Brian Boyé, the fashion and grooming director at Men’s Health magazine. “But now facial hair is nearly universally accepted.”
For corporate types, sporting facial hair carries a whiff of rebellion — “it represents freedom of expression,” says Boyé.
Advertising is one business that harbors more beards than a lumberjack’s camp, says Tor Myhren, chief creative officer at Grey North America.
“It seems to be the norm,” he says. “Everything from big bushy beards to full-on Rollie Fingers mustaches, where you can twirl it. It’s so ubiquitous that nobody notices.”
Even in a buttoned-down culture like Wall Street, facial hair is growing.
“Guys in finance — it’s starting to happen,” says Damien Miano, co-owner of Miano Viel Salon & Spa in Manhattan. While nobody at Goldman Sachs is rolling into meetings looking like Joaquin Phoenix, Miano says well-trimmed beards and goatees (“their way of entering the beard market,” he notes) are increasingly common among the banking class.
If you hate the trend, blame the dismal employment market and youth culture gone wild, experts say.
“The economy dictated it,” says Miano. “The younger guys who are unemployed, they like it and it becomes sort of a style.”
Both Boyé and Miano note that job-free living creates the time and the impetus for facial hair, allowing men to try out what Miano calls “man makeup.”
And when money is tight, saving a buck or two on razors provides added impetus for follicle experimentation.
Of course not all employers are hep to hair, and in those cases workers may have to choose between a razor and the boss’ ax. The law offers no protection for those sporting facial hair, unless it relates to religion or a disability.
Such lawsuits aren’t unheard of. In 2008, a group of Houston police officers sued the city over its grooming policy, saying a disability prevented them from shaving. And a Sikh man sued a Lexus dealership in New Jersey after he said he was denied a job offer because he refused to shave his beard on religious grounds.
“Employers are given latitude to adopt grooming standards that they feel are appropriate for their workplace,” says labor attorney Katharine Parker, a partner at Proskauer, who notes that there still are “plenty of employers who have a clean-grooming standard.”
If you’re experiencing the urge to ditch the razor, now is the time, says Miano, who gives the trend another year of validity before the pendulum swings back.
“We’re at the peak of it right now,” he says.