Everyone loves a bit of obscure history, and across the globe, certain countries can have archaic laws that just don’t make sense in modern life and are rarely adhered to.
For example, in the UK you could theoretically be arrested for walking a cow through the streets of London in daylight.
These archaic laws are pretty common in the US as well. Thanks to our unique federal legislation system certain states have their own silly laws that people deem archaic while still theoretically being enforceable by law.
One crazy federal law that has an interesting story is that in Nevada it is illegal for a man with a mustache to kiss a woman. Obviously, this isn’t enforced in modern life, but why does this law exist?
Keep reading to learn more about this strange and interesting facial hair ruling, below!
Facial Hair Prohibition
Did you know that, according to this study, a man’s beard can contain more germs than dog fur, and animal fur in general? While this is a bit of a moot point, more on that later, it was this thinking that led to many laws prohibiting facial hair across the globe.
Let’s go back to 1800s Britain and Early America. This was a period of time when disease control was arguably at an all-time low.
Diseases such as smallpox, cholera, typhus, dysentery, yellow fever, scarlet fever, syphilis, measles, malaria, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and influenza, to name a few, were commonplace in the cities.
These diseases are highly contagious and without proper infection prevention at the time, nor vaccines, these diseases were allowed to roam free and were also death sentences with little cures out there.
During the 1800s it was diseases that caused most of the death, especially in children.
During the 1800s life expectancy was extremely low, and in certain cases was as low as 50 or even lower, mainly due to these diseases being free to spread as they wished.
Consider that penicillin was not discovered until 1928, and not used to treat humans until 20 years later.
So the knowledge of disease control and prevention itself was the lowest it could be in the 1800s with technology and medicine far behind what we see in the modern day.
If there was a disease in a family, it could easily wipe out a whole generation, so many people feared disease greatly but had little resources to prevent it.
Diseases were fatal in this period, so people came up with unique and often bizarre ways to attempt to curtail the spread of disease, especially in cities where sanitization and living conditions were also pretty dire. Just think about the classically terrifying plague doctor mask from Victorian England.
These plague doctors stuffed the beaks of their masks with heavily aromatic herbs and flowers as they thought that by reducing the smell of the plagued bodies, they would prevent themselves from being infected.
This was based on the quickly abandoned ‘miasma theory’ that the ‘bad air’ that caused smells, etc, from plagued and dead bodies was the cause for disease spread. This was a misinformed understanding of these diseases being airborne.
The point we are making is that in lieu of proper medical research, which wasn’t available at the time, people came up with some pretty interesting ideas about how diseases spread.
One such idea, which is partly true, is that male facial hair would somehow pass diseases to others.
This is partly related to this imperfect understanding of ‘miasma’. The miasma theory took hold of many and what they were actually observing, without the knowledge to understand it, was that these diseases were occasionally airborne.
The absence of proper medical research led to other theories on miasma being reported such as that you could become obese by smelling too much food.
As a result, it was thought that this noxious air, called miasma, could somehow get into the facial hair of men.
In this state of pre-knowledge, rules were devised whereby it was discouraged to have facial hair.
Outruling facial hair altogether wasn’t in line with the philosophical ideas on individual agency at the time, especially in the US, so compromises were made where if you chose to have any facial hair, mustache included, you weren’t allowed to kiss anyone and doing so would be a threat to public health.
Can You Spread Disease Through Your Facial Hair?
While miasma theory has since been abandoned in the wake of modern science, what does modern medicine tell us about facial hair and disease spread?
Well, hair generally can carry disease. The bubonic plague in England was likely spread from fleas to rats and then through rats’ fur to humans who then spread it between themselves. The fur on animals is one, of many, ways an animal could spread disease to humans through direct contact.
The reasons why diseases can spread through animal fur are theoretically applicable to human hair too. Hair, generally, is dense and can hold many microbial organisms.
Moreover, in theory, facial hair can also catch respiratory microbes that can also spread respiratory transmitted diseases.
This latter theory is likely why a male beard can carry a higher viral load than a dog’s fur as suggested in the aforementioned study. However, better research suggests that facial hair is only as at risk of bacterial colonization as human skin is anyway.
A different 2014 study focussed on hospital workers, who are more likely to carry disease, and compared male healthcare workers with and without facial hair.
It found that the bacterial colonization on the faces of healthcare workers with and without facial hair was remarkably similar (41% with and 52% without).
This seems to settle the debate that facial hair can theoretically carry a lot of microbial germs that can spread disease. While this is true, it remains a moot point as our skin is just as at risk of spreading disease as facial hair is.
The takeaway from this is that our facial hair and skin should be sanitized regularly in order to prevent the spread of disease. But in terms of kissing someone, whether you have facial hair or not doesn’t actually affect the risk of disease transmission that greatly.
Final Thoughts
We can assume that the law in Eureka, Nevada, pertaining to men with facial hair kissing women, is likely an archaic law related to the misinformed theory that facial hair was a leading cause of disease transmission back in the 1800s – this is likely based in the now abandoned medical theory of ‘miasma’ being a cause of disease spread.
Many laws were created similar to this around the world, many of which were ill-informed and lacked the correct medical research to provide a proper scientific study on the matter.
In reality, with modern medical and scientific research, it seems that facial hair can pass disease but only as much as our actual skin can.
To surmise, the law in Nevada was devised as a misinformed attempt to prevent disease spread back in the 1800s. Facial hair can spread disease but only as much as a clean-shaven face can.
