facial hair

From facial +‎ hair. First use appears c. 1830, in the Morning Herald.

facial hair (usually uncountable, plural facial hairs)

1. (uncountable) Hair on, or from, the face of a human, such as the eyebrows of a man or woman or the androgenic hair (beard or moustache) of a man.

   Synonym: face pubes (slang)

   • 1988 July, Cathy Gillen Thacker, chapter 14, in Fatal Amusement (Harlequin Intrigue), Toronto, Ont.: Harlequin Books, →ISBN, page 211:

     Shaving gear? The man had a beard—or he had one the last time Marianne had seen him. And yet there were flecks of shaving foam and facial hair in the sink.

   • 1995 October 26, “Accent on Women's Art Latinas at two...”, in The Denver Post:

     Her dark, arched eyebrows and soft facial hair complement the membranous leaves behind her.

   • 2000, Daniel McNeill, The Face: A Natural History, page 198:

     The Mbaya of the Amazon remove all facial hair, including eyelashes and eyebrows, and sneer at full-browed whites as "ostrich-brothers".

   • 2004, Mark Busby, The Southwest‎^[1], page 152:

     Some tribes also practiced nose piercing, and men typically removed their eyelashes, eyebrows and facial hair through plucking.

   • 2012, Margo DeMello, Faces Around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia of the Human Face, page 134:

     Because women naturally do not have a great deal of hair on their faces, it is considered a sign of femininity to have as little facial hair (except for eyebrows and eyelashes) as possible

2. (uncountable) Hair on, or from, the face of an animal.
3. (countable, rare) A single hair on, or from, the face.
   • 1998, Kathy Lette, “Send In the Crones”, in Altar Ego, London: Picador, →ISBN, part 1 (The Wedding), page 45:

     Wielding a cotton bud like a miniature police truncheon, she pointed to one small black hair I’d never noticed sprouting from my chin. It looked, in the magnified looking glass, like a sequoia tree. / ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ / ‘It’s normal as we age that . . .’ / ‘Would you stop with all this ageing crap, already. I have one facial hair. It’s not as though I’m about to start baying at the moon . . .’

   • 2001, Richard E. Bisbing, “Finding Trace Evidence”, in Max M. Houck, editor, Mute Witnesses: Trace Evidence Analysis, London; San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press, →ISBN, pages 93–94:

     This was the only foreign hair, a facial hair, recovered from the victim’s body, and, at that stage of the investigation, the hair evidence seemed pretty meager. Nevertheless, the facial hair would ultimately take a central role in the investigation and the fact that the victim’s pubic hairs were cut would greatly assist with subsequent comparisons. […] The detectives now had the last person seen with the victim at the party, a facial hair, a palm print that could not be eliminated, and something to look for, the shoes that left the footwear impressions on the kitchen floor. […] Although an association was never made between that one facial hair from the bathrobe and known hair from the defendant, it took its place as a linchpin in the solution of the case.

   • 2021, W. M. M. Botejue, L. Ranathunga, “A Guided Visual Feature Generation and Classification Model for Fabric Artwork Defect Detection”, in Subarna Shakya, Valentina Emilia Balas, Wang Haoxiang, Zubair Baig, editors, Proceedings of International Conference on Sustainable Expert Systems: ICSES 2020 (Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems; 176), Singapore: Springer, →ISBN, page 434:

     In (b), one facial hair of the cat is damaged. This can be categorized as size, shape, or a color defect.

   • 2025, Gina Tonic, “The Time I Got Diagnosed with PCOS”, in Greedy Guts: Notes from an Insatiable Woman, London: Coronet, →ISBN:

     But this bit of facial hair was different. It was a thick, persistent curl that kept appearing on the left-hand side of my chin. I’d find myself toying with it absent-mindedly, before realising what I was doing and ripping it out with the firm grip of my fingertips. If I couldn’t get a good enough hold on it, my tweezers would get the job done, and I’d promptly forget about owning one facial hair until the next time I caught myself twirling it around a nail.