By Jack BeresfordShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberA dad in Georgia captured his daughter’s stunned reaction to seeing him without a beard for the first time in her life.
Mom of two Shawnna shared a clip to her TikTok, @loyallyshawnna, of the moment her husband Michael sprang the surprise on their 5-year-old daughter Emory.
“He’s been thinking about it for a while,” Shawnna told Newsweek. “Then he did it one morning.” Shawnna was the first to be confronted with Michael’s new clean-shaven look.
Unaware that he was home at the time and had taken such drastic action, Shawnna was startled at seeing the clean-shaven Michael after he had just done the deed and being confronted by what she thought was a “new face” in her home.
In Shawnna’s defense, Michael had previously gone 11 years without shaving off his beard before spontaneously doing away with the facial hair.
Michael’s new look is starting to grow on her though. “He looks good,” Shawnna said. “It just took some time to recognize him when I first saw it.”
Emory’s reaction was a little different though. In the clip posted online, Michael can be seen sitting in the front of a car, with Emory in the back, while a face covering is keeping his newly-shaven face under wraps.
“I got a surprise for you,” he declares, before removing the face mask and turning around to show Emory his new look.
There are several seconds of silence, interrupted by Michael’s nervous laughter, as Emory appears to be trying to process the change.
Finally, Emory lets out a deflated-sounding “Oh!” That prompts more laughter from Michael. Emory begins to laugh. “You cut your beard off,” she says, incredulous.
“Do I look different?” Michael asks. “Yeah you look like a different man,” Emory replies.
“Do I look different?” Michael asks again, with Emory responding with the killer blow, telling her dad: “yes, you look like an old man.”
...Though Emory’s assessment may have been amusing, if slightly brutal, it’s not necessarily a surprise. Research has highlighted how young children often perceive beards as an indicator of strength.
A 2019 study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior saw researchers put the perception of beards to the test in an experiment involving 470 kids from toddlers to teenagers.
The children were asked to look at a series of paired photos, each showing a man with a beard and the same man clean-shaven. They were then asked which of the men looked stronger, which looked older and which looked the best.
While the kids tended to say the clean shaven men looked “best," bearded men scored better for looking older and, crucially, stronger.
Though he laughed Emory’s reaction off at the time, Shawnna said Michael was left slightly concerned he now “looks like a stranger” to his daughter. “She doesn’t like it,” Shawnna said “But he doesn’t regret it. Hair grows back!”
Even if he doesn’t necessarily regret ditching the beard after more than a decade, it would appear Michael is already on the way to growing it back, and Emory is delighted.
“He hasn’t shaved again so it’s scruffy,” Shawnna said. “But Emory said he’s starting to look like her real dad again.”
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