Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Netflix
It’s the kind of sentence that instantly changes in meaning, depending on when one happens to read it: “Penn Badgley Knows How People Feel About His Beard.”
Read it today, and you might think of words like enamored, or extremely thirsty. This was not the case in 2012, when Netflix’s You star was still turning heads (and inspiring eyerolls) as Dan Humphrey on the CW’s Gossip Girl. Back then, when Vulture published the headline in question, the man who would become Joe Goldberg announced his plan to shave the beard he’d grown during the show’s summer hiatus—both for work, and also because “I know everybody hates it.”
Now, though? A movement has sprouted. The beard craze that had already begun to take hold before Badgley grew out his face badger has now been in full swing for about a decade. It is now perfectly mainstream—and so obvious that it’s actually become boring, in fact!—to say that beards are hot.