[Nate the Great]

As a supplement to "Mirror, Mirror" this post is about goatees on evil twins!

Wikipedia discusses the subject, while pointing out that the prime example of Mirror Mirror isn't really "evil". Furthermore, Chris Seibold (a movie reviewer featured on Rotten Tomatoes) has this to say:

You can't go to the evil twin school of plotting very often if you're hack writing your way through Hollywood, but once you do it's thankfully easy. You slap a goatee on somebody (evil Spock, Evil David Hasselhoff) and voila: evil twin goodness. The rest of the story, I am told, writes itself.

Gizmodo discusses the phenomenon:

You can't be a decent evil twin without bushy, severely slanted eyebrows, and a nice pointy goatee. But why do we read these features as so very diabolical? A study explains that it all has to do with the geometry of evil.


Dr Derrick Watson and Dr Elisabeth Blagrove of the Unversity of Warwick have apparently grown up watching the same cartoons that I have. Anyone worth their salt knows that the evil twin has a pointy beard — or, at the very least, dark eyebrows that were slanted in a way that made them look angry. Usually the twin does things like rubbing their hands together and cackling evilly, to remove all doubt, but that's just for the people who can't pick up on visual cues. Why are the goatee and the severe eyebrows such a universal code for evil?

The researchers think that those features give a face a shape more like a downward pointing triangle. People seem to find the shape itself threatening.
"Evil Twin Goatee" is a buyable item in Neopets.