Cool beards and mustaches. What Are the Top Beard Styles in Every State?, 963XKE, Fort Wayne s Classic Rock, Fort Wayne, IN

Fall is right around the corner, and we all know what that means: pumpkin spice lattes, apple picking, autumn weddings, and our personal favorite: beard season. Men's mustache and beard styles.

To show support for past, present, and future bearded grooms, TheBlackTux.com decided to explore trends in facial hair across the country. To do this, they used Google Trends search data to determine the most popular, or most searched, beard style in every U.S. state and region. Additionally, they determined the overall most popular beard styles in the U.S. by calculating the beards that were most-searched in the highest count of states.

Ready to impress your friends with your suspiciously deep knowledge of the country’s top beard trends? Simply want to justify your patch of soul? In both cases, read on.

The folks at the Black Tux decided to give peace a chance, and start with the Peace Garden State (aka North Dakota). The study showed that stubble is the most popular form of facial hair in North Dakota. With an average winter temperature of 12 degrees, we they sort of assumed North Dakotans would be full beard folks (because #warmth), but this is not the case. However, other states with notoriously chilly temperatures, like Massachusetts, Michigan, and New Jersey, do prefer full beards.

What type of mustache is right for me

As it turns out, there are also a couple of southern states—namely, North Carolina and Louisiana—that are on the full beard bandwagon. While they’re not quite sure what sparked North Carolina’s adoration of full beards, but we can’t help but wonder if Duck Dynasty is correlated with Louisiana’s full beard infatuation.

They noticed an interesting trend among the “A” states. Even though Alabama and Arkansas are in entirely different parts of the country than Arizona and Alaska, the goatee remains the most popular beard style in each of these states. Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, and Rhode Island are some of the other states that fancy a good goatee.

West Virginia, Michigan, and Illinois have seen the greatest number of Flemish immigrants over the years, so one would naturally assume the Van Dyke—named for notable Fleming Sir Anthony van Dyck and his signature foliage—would be popular in these states. It will undoubtedly shock you to learn that these states prefer chin straps (WV), full beards (MI), and yeards (IL). However, the Van Dyke beard did triumph in Virginia.

Stache man

So what about regional beard trends? We’re glad you asked. The breakdown is pretty simple, but quirkier than we imagined. We expected more mainstream options like full beards or even stubble to perform best regionally, but it seems that Americans from three of the four major regions, the Midwest, Northeast, and the South, are really into goatees. Now, is it a coincidence that Brad Pitt, who has consistently been deemed one of the sexiest men alive, has been rocking a goatee as of late? Impossible to say, but probably not.

The regional beard trends in this study turned out to be solid indicators of the national trends. The goatee, which dominated three out of four regions, is also the most popular beard nationally, earning the most-searched beard title in a total of fifteen states. And as the most popular beard in ten states, the mustache isn’t all that far behind.