Jon Connell lists five things that we learned this week in the news trends now View comments 1) The British Army helped popularise beards in the Victorian era. During the Crimean War in the mid-1850s, says The Economist, soldiers were permitted facial hair on account of the extreme cold weather. The conflict was ‘the first to be extensively photographed’, and as images of whiskered soldiers were transmitted back to Britain, full beards ‘became associated with martial virtues’.