To Beard or Not to Beard

From The New Yorker:

The beard has been going in and out of fashion as long as men have been able to trim their whiskers. In 1938, The New Yorker published an article titled “American Hair: Its Rises and Falls,” a Depression-era trend piece by Lewis Gannett about the connections of the beard and the mustache to “the mysterious tides of our history.” Gannett remarks that the New World was discovered and settled almost entirely by men with whiskers…

But, by the eighteenth century, due in part to the influence of the Puritans, the beard was out and the wig was in. “Not one of the signers of the American Constitution wore a beard or even a mustache,” Gannett notes…

After its peak in the late nineteenth century, the American beard went into retreat, and remained so until the counterculture movements of the nineteen-sixties and seventies….

What’s your wisdom on the beard or not to beard question?