What a Beard Does

Someone added beards to Disney princesses and the internet, predictably, loved it. Ariel with a mermaid’s salt-tangled beard, Pocahontas with something rugged and windswept, Snow White inexplicably pulling off a full academic beard—the whole thing is stupid and I went through every single one.

The joke lands because some of them genuinely work. Mulan with a long scholar’s beard looks like a figure lifted from a Song dynasty painting—composed, authoritative, freed from whatever the original character was straining to be. The beard repositions her. Gives her a gravity she didn’t have before. "Beauty and the Beard," "Alice in Beardland," "The King of Beards"—whoever was responsible for the titles deserved a raise and probably didn’t get one.

There’s something to it beyond the gag, though I’m aware I’m reading too hard into a BuzzFeed post. Facial hair is one of the few design elements that immediately shifts the register of a face—from ingenue to elder, from decorative to weathered. Stick a beard on anything and it becomes, briefly, a different kind of serious. Even a cartoon mermaid.