Also known as razor bumps, PFB is a skin condition that makes shaving painful and can lead to permanent scarring if the skin is not allowed to heal. Adhering to the Air Force’s prohibition on beards is difficult for many Black airmen who have a medical condition called pseudofolliculitis barbae. More scientific evidence is needed to inform the military’s grooming standards, Ritchie said, because the current policies have a discriminatory effect on service members of color. “A lot of the consensus papers and position papers on this rely on expert opinion, but none of it is based on an actual scientific study like ‘hey, let’s have people put a M-50 mask on and study that.’” ![]() “In the scientific community, anecdotes are the lowest level of evidence for making recommendations,” the doctor said. ![]() While supporters of current Air Force policy “may have anecdotal evidence of one to five people who they see fail the fit test,” he said, “that can’t be extrapolated to hundreds of thousands of airmen.”Īnecdotal evidence is useful, Ritchie said, but in his years of analyzing the issue he has yet to find an up-to-date, scientifically rigorous study showing that neatly trimmed facial hair impacts the seals of military gas masks. Simon Ritchie, a dermatologist who last year published a study on the beard prohibition’s discriminatory effect on Black airmen. “It’s an unsubstantiated claim,” said Lt. While many military leaders defending the beard prohibition have repeated the claim that beards break gas mask seals, one Air Force doctor has found no direct scientific evidence to support it. military leaders have prohibited service members from growing beards, arguing that facial hair not only disrupts a clean, professional appearance, but also interferes with the seal of a gas mask, oxygen mask or other devices that service members wear to survive hazardous environments. ![]() (Illustration by Matt Battaglia / Task & Purpose).
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