Goatee

A goatee is a style of facial hair incorporating hair on a man's chin but not his cheeks. The exact nature of the style has varied according to time and culture.

Uncle Sam is generally depicted with a goatee (painting by James Montgomery Flagg, 1917).

Description
Traditional goatee with moustache (19th century)
A more modern combination of goatee and moustache

Until the late 20th century, the term goatee was used to refer solely to a beard formed by a tuft of hair on the chin—as on the chin of a goat, hence the term 'goatee'.[1] By the 1990s, the word had become an umbrella term used to refer to any facial hair style incorporating hair on the chin but not the cheeks;[2] there is debate over whether this style is correctly called a goatee or a Van Dyke.[3]

History

The style dates back to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. The god Pan was traditionally depicted with goat-like features, including a goatee. When Christianity became the dominant religion and began copying imagery from pagan myth, Satan was given the likeness of Pan,[4] leading to Satan traditionally being depicted with a goatee[5] in medieval art and Renaissance art.

The goatee would not enjoy widespread popularity again until the 1940s, when it became a defining trait of the beatniks in the post-World War II United States. The style remained popular amongst the counter-culture until the 1960s before falling out of favor again. In the 1990s, goatees with incorporated mustaches became fashionable for men across all socioeconomic classes and professions, and have remained popular into the 2010s.

In the media, goatees have often been used to designate an evil or morally questionable character; the convention has most consistently been applied in media depicting evil twins, with a goatee often being the sole physical difference between the twins.[6] Goatees have also been used to signify a character's transformation from positive or neutral to evil. The use of goatees to designate evil characters has become enough of a trope that researchers from the University of Warwick conducted a study to assess the reasons for its prevalence. The study found that the human brain tends to perceive downwards-facing triangles as inherently threatening; brains tend to perceive goatees as making the human face resemble a downwards-facing triangle, causing individuals to subconsciously perceive those with goatees as inherently sinister or threatening.[6]

In media depicting members of counter-cultures, goatees have also been used to differentiate between average characters and those belonging to some subgroup. Examples include Bob Denver on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, whose goatee serves to identify him as a beatnik; Shaggy Rogers on Scooby Doo, Where Are You?, who is, in part, identified as a hippie by his goatee; and the DC Comics superhero Green Arrow, who was visually redesigned with such a beard in the late 1960s, inspiring writer Dennis O'Neil to re-imagine him as a politically active counter-culture hero.

See also

References
  1. "goatee". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  2. Howard, Rebecca (10 September 1992). "Year of the Goat: Goatee is kicking again". The Globe and Mail.
  3. Shrieves, Linda (12 November 1993). "Goatees, the new hair apparent". The Buffalo News.
  4. Burton Russell, Jeffrey (1987). The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Cornell University Press. pp. 125–126. ISBN 0801494095.
  5. Ferber, Michael (2017). "Goat". A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-17211-1.
  6. "Scientists Prove that a Goatee Makes you Look Evil". i09.com. Retrieved 1 June 2012.
  • Media related to Goatees at Wikimedia Commons
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.