Beards Trivia
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108 free Beards trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This beards trivia quiz covers facial hair from the pharaohs to the playoff beard. The easy questions ask about the hormone behind beard growth, the naturalist who first tied beards to sexual selection, the general whose name gave us sideburns, the last U.S. president to wear facial hair and the country the bearded dragon calls home. From there it moves into the ancient world: the false beards of Egyptian royalty, the Roman who apparently shaved first, the emperor who grew a beard to hide his scars and the Stoic who said he would rather be beheaded than shave. The hard end is for people who collect odd facts: Peter the Great's beard token, the 1936 no-beard tax, the pope who wore a beard in mourning for Bologna, the razor brand that coined five o'clock shadow, the Japanese city that banned beards for civil servants, and the 5.33-metre beard now kept at the Smithsonian. Beard styles, sports superstitions, religious rules and the World Beard and Moustache Championships all get their turn. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on beards, the beard tax, the playoff beard and the championships before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Blackbeard and Movember-adjacent history quizzes next.
30 of 108 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Beard growth in men is driven by the stimulation of hair follicles by which hormone?
Dihydrotestosterone
Dihydrotestosterone is made from testosterone, and the same hormone that thickens the beard also shrinks scalp follicles, which drives male-pattern baldness.
Q 02Which naturalist argued that men's beards arose as an ornament to attract women?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin called it sexual selection: in The Descent of Man he argued that men's ape-like ancestors acquired beards to charm the opposite sex, and that women lost their body hair as an ornament too.
Q 03Long before Cleopatra, which female pharaoh had her statues show her wearing a king's false beard?
Hatshepsut
Hatshepsut took on the full regalia of kingship in her portraits, false beard included, and after her death her statues were torn down and her name was struck from the king list.
Q 04How did the Spartans punish cowards, according to ancient sources?
By shaving off part of their beards
By shaving off part of their beards: Plutarch says Sparta's 'runaways' went about with half the beard shaved and half grown, in patched cloaks, and anyone who met them could strike them.
Q 05Roman writers Varro and Pliny say the first barbers reached Italy around 300 BCE from which island?
Sicily
Sicily supplied them, brought over by one Titinius Mena; before that, Varro notes, Romans went unshorn, as the long hair and big beards on their oldest statues showed.
Q 06According to Cassius Dio, which Roman emperor first set the fashion of wearing a beard?
Hadrian
Hadrian broke with generations of clean-shaven emperors, and the Historia Augusta claims he wore a full beard to cover natural blemishes on his face.
Q 07Nero sealed the hair from his first shave in a pearl-set gold box and dedicated it to which god?
Jupiter
Jupiter received the box on the Capitol, and in Cassius Dio's telling Nero founded a new festival, the Juvenalia, in honour of the shave and made nobles perform on stage.
Q 08Which Greek Stoic said he would sooner lose his head than shave off his beard?
Epictetus
Epictetus tells it in the Discourses: a philosopher does not shave, he says, and to the threat of beheading he answers that if it will do any good, go ahead.
Q 09Which Roman emperor had the hair and beard of the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana forcibly shaved off?
Domitian
Domitian had the sage shorn and chained before his trial, and in Philostratus's telling Apollonius only remarked that he had not realised it was his hair that was at risk.
Q 10Which Germanic people are said to be named for their long beards?
Lombards
Lombards comes from Langobardi, usually read as 'long beards'; in their own legend the women tied their hair across their faces like beards, and the god Godan asked who the long-beards were.
Q 11Tacitus wrote that a young man of the Germanic Chatti could not shave or cut his hair until he had done what?
Killed an enemy
Killed an enemy: only then did he bare his face, standing over the body, and Tacitus adds that the bravest Chatti also wore an iron ring, a badge of shame, until their first kill.
Q 12Which Spanish hero boasts that no man has ever plucked his beard?
El Cid
El Cid makes the boast in the Poem of the Cid, at the king's court, where he arrives with his long beard bound in a cord and reminds a rival count that he once tore a tuft from the count's own beard.
Q 13Which emperor do medieval epics give a great white 'blossoming' beard?
Charlemagne
Q 21Which pope grew a beard in 1511–12 as a sign of mourning for the loss of the city of Bologna?
Julius II
He is regarded as the first pope of relatively modern times to wear a beard, though he only kept it for a while.
Q 22Which English sea captain claimed in 1587 to have 'singed the King of Spain's beard'?
Francis Drake
Francis Drake was boasting of his raid on Cádiz, where he burned ships and stores gathered for the invasion of England; it set the Armada back by a year but did not stop it.
Q 23Which pirate is said to have fought with lit fuses smoking under his hat?
Blackbeard
Blackbeard owed his name to a luxuriant black beard that, by a 1724 account, he grew up to his eyes and twisted into small tails tied with ribbons.
Charlemagne is 'Charles the old, with his great blossoming beard' in The Song of Roland, written centuries after his death; in life he wore his hair short and kept a moustache.
Q 14Which Russian tsar shaved his nobles himself, then taxed beards?
Peter the Great
Peter the Great came home from a tour of Western Europe in 1698 convinced that Russia had to modernise, and at his welcome reception the beards were the first thing to go.
Q 15Which Russian empress finally lifted the beard tax, decades after it was introduced?
Catherine the Great
Catherine the Great ended a levy that in its early years charged even a peasant a kopek for his beard each time he passed through a town gate.
Q 16What did Russians who paid the beard tax have to carry as proof?
A copper or silver token
A copper or silver token proved payment, silver for nobles and copper for commoners, and guards at town gates could turn back any bearded man without one.
Q 17Which rock band's longtime drummer, Frank Beard, was famously its only member without a long beard?
ZZ Top
ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill came back from a late-1970s break wearing the chest-length beards that became the band's trademark, while Frank Beard went without one.
Q 18Which bearded French king obtained a papal brief letting him tax priests who kept their beards?
Francis I
Francis I used the brief to raise money: wealthy court clerics paid and kept their beards, poor village priests had to shave, and the two camps came to resent each other.
Q 19A persistent legend says which bearded English king introduced a tax on beards?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII is the usual culprit in the story, yet the National Archives at Kew holds no record that any such tax was ever passed.
Q 20Pope Clement VII grew a beard in mourning for which disaster?
Sack of Rome
The sack of Rome by an emperor's mutinous, unpaid troops left Clement VII holed up in the Castel Sant'Angelo, and his mourning beard broke the church's own rule that clergy shave.
Q 24As of 2025, who was the last U.S. president to keep a moustache or beard in office?
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft's moustache left the White House in 1913; the only presidential whiskers since were the five-day 'Jeff Davis' stubble Harry Truman grew on holiday in Key West in 1948.
Q 25Which vice president was the first since 1933 to wear facial hair in office?
JD Vance
JD Vance ended a long drought: the last major-party presidential nominee with facial hair was the moustached Thomas Dewey, and some pundits blamed his 1948 defeat partly on the moustache.
Q 26Which 11-year-old girl wrote to a presidential candidate in October 1860 urging him to grow a beard?
Grace Bedell
Grace Bedell told the future president his face was so thin that whiskers would improve it, and that ladies who liked them would tease their husbands into voting for him.
Q 27Which Union general's flamboyant whiskers gave English its everyday word for hair grown down the cheeks?
Ambrose Burnside
Ambrose Burnside joined his cheek whiskers to his moustache and shaved his chin; the look was first called 'burnsides', and the word was later flipped into sideburns.
Q 28Which entertainment company banned beards on its theme-park staff for more than 50 years, until 2012?
Disney
Disney had barred facial hair since Disneyland opened in the 1950s and relented on moustaches only in 2000; even the 2012 rule kept beards to a quarter of an inch.
Q 29The Van Dyke beard is sometimes called a 'Charlie' after which monarch, who was painted wearing one?
Charles I of England
Charles I of England even had van Dyck paint his head from three angles on one canvas, so that Bernini in Rome could carve his bust without ever meeting him.
Q 30A chin curtain beard, covering the chin with no moustache, is also known by which president's name?
Lincoln
Lincoln had never worn whiskers before the 1860 campaign, so the beard that gave the chin curtain its other name was only months old when he took office.