When you stop to think about it, eyebrows are pretty dang weird. On our otherwise smooth upper faces, we’ve got these two strips of hair that sit above our eyeballs.

One theory as to why we have eyebrows is that they keep rain and sweat from running into our eyes. But their primary purpose seems to be for communication; they convey the subtleties of our emotions. If eyes are the windows to the soul, eyebrows are the signposts to our mood.

As for my own eyebrows, I’ve got quite the set of thick and furry ones. Kate and my kids say that my brows, coupled with my Roman nose and serious demeanor, make me resemble Sam the Eagle from the Muppets. I’ll take that. Sam the Eagle has gravitas!

My thick, distinguished eyebrows seems to be a distinctive feature of my mom’s side of the family. A few years ago we went to a family reunion where Kate got to meet my aunts, uncles, and cousins. She observed that we all sported the same characteristically bushy over-eye fur. Must be a dominant gene.

I never had to maintain my thick eyebrows that much in my youth, but now that I’m in middle age, they can get pretty gnarly. As you get older, long-term exposure to hormones causes the follicles for your eyebrows, as well as those for nose and ear hair, to grow thicker and longer. 

Nowadays, if I don’t take care of my eyebrows, instead of looking distinguished, they get to looking like like big, furry, unsightly caterpillars. Consequently, I’ve had to start regularly trimming my brows.

If your eyebrows could similarly use a trim, here to show us how its done is none other than Sam the Eagle. It was only proper that he’d be our guide in the way of distinguished, dignified, well-groomed brows. 

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in February 2021.

The popularity of beards has waxed (the mid 19th century) and waned (the 1950s), and for the past decade or so has been on the definite upswing. Maybe you’ve tried growing one out yourself. Maybe you did it willy nilly, deciding on your beard’s length/style as you went along. Or, perhaps you took a more intentional approach and looked up the copious advice out there on which beard type was right for you.

And that’s likely when the trouble started.

Because most of the guides out there on men’s beard styles are terrible.

There are those which highlight categories like the “corporate beard” and the “short beard” as separate beard styles . . . but when you look at them, they look exactly the same. 

Or, these guides will give beard styles weird names that often just seem made up. If I were to go to a barber and say, “I want the ‘Garibaldi’ beard style,” would that mean anything to him, or would he just look at me like a weirdo?

To cut through all this noise, I asked an actual barber — Thad Forrester, owner of Hudson / Hawk Barber & Shop — for his take on the advice that currently inhabits this space on the interwebs. Thad said:

The guys who write those beard style articles have been playing too much Red Dead Redemption. While beard styles have names in cowboy video games, 99% of barbers would have no clue what you mean if you asked for a ‘Garibaldi’ beard.

Also, most beard style guides don’t actually guide you on how to pick a beard that will actually look good on your face. So you end up with guys seeing a beard that looks good on some guy on the internet, and trying to grow that same beard, but then end up looking ridiculous in the process. You’ve got to pick a beard style that works for you.

Fortunately, Thad followed up this critical appraisal with tips on how to do just that.

Below, he helps lay down a no-nonsense guide to picking the best beard style for your face. No silly names included. 

The Prerequisite: Grow Your Beard Out For a Month (Minimum)

Before deciding what beard style you’d like, you need to grow your beard out to see what you’re working with. Thad recommends letting things grow out for at least a month:

After a few weeks, you can tell what sort of beard a man will be able to grow just by looking at the density of the hair on the face and the hair texture on the face. Some guys will have really thick, full beards, and other guys will have more patchy beards like mine. The thickness of your beard growth will be a big factor in determining what beard styles are open to you. 

Make sure to check out our in-depth guide on how to grow a beard.

How to Pick a Beard Style That’s Right For You

After you’ve grown your beard out for a month, then you can start thinking about beard styles. 

When he’s consulting with a client on how to style his beard, Thad steers him to a style that will compliment: 1) the way his facial hair grows in, and 2) the shape of his head.

As Thad explains: “If a guy tries to grow a beard that looks good on a celebrity but wouldn’t compliment their own face and facial hair, they’re just going to look silly. You’ve got to work with what you got.”

Criteria #1 for Selecting a Beard Style: Facial Hair Thickness

If your beard is thick, you’ve got more styling options. If your facial hair grows in nice and thick, you’re going to have multiple choices on how to style it. “When you have a thick beard, you’ll be able to pick a style that’s closely cropped to your face or grown out,” Thad said. 

If your beard is patchy, keep your beard short. “If mother nature has endowed you with a patchy, sparse beard, your options are going to be limited on beard styles,” Thad said. “If you try to grow a long beard, it’s just going to look stringy and unkempt.” 

This doesn’t mean you can’t have any facial hair. For a guy with patchy facial hair, Thad recommends sticking to stubble or closely cropped beards. But keep things cropped along your natural facial hairline.

Thad has noticed that many guys with patchy beards go for the chin strap beard style that was popular in the late 90s. “Because guys with patchy beards have a hard time growing facial hair on their cheeks, they’ll just keep their cheeks clean-shaven, but let their beard grow along their chin,” Thad explained. “It’s a pretty dated style and has been declining in popularity for the past few decades or so. I never thought it was a good look even when it was popular twenty years ago.”

If the only way you can keep your beard trimmed to your natural facial hairline is to do a chin strap beard, having a beard at all may not be for you.

Alas, here we have the so-called “Matthew effect” in action: to he who has more beard, more beard will be given, but from he who has little beard, even that which he has will be taken away.

Criteria #2 for Selecting a Beard Style: Consider the Shape of Your Face

Click here for details on how to figure out your face shape.

After looking at whether you have patchy or full facial hair, Thad recommends looking at your face shape when determining your beard style. “The goal is to make your head look as oval as possible.” In aiming at an oval shape, you increase your head’s overall symmetry and proportionality.

This means you need to consider how long your beard goes below your chin and how wide it grows out from your face. “Some face shapes will look better with a beard that grows long beneath the chin but is kept cropped, so it doesn’t grow out wide. Or you may have a face shape [where the beard] would look better shorter and closer to the chin, but grown out a bit wider to give your face width,” Thad told me.

When choosing a beard style, you also need to consider your hairstyle. As Thad explained in our article about choosing the best haircut for your face shape, “If you have a long rectangle face, having a haircut with height plus a long beard is going to make your head look even longer, like Beaker from the Muppets. You don’t want that.”

Below we get into the specifics of what types of beard styles go best with different types of face shapes; they’re described in simple terms — short/wide/long — that you should be able to readily understand yourself, and communicate with your barber if needs be.

Oval Face. If you have an oval face, your beard options are limitless. “Short beards, long beards, full beards. All look good on a man with an oval face,” Thad says.

Round Face. If you have a round-shaped face, you want to pick a beard and hairstyle that will give some length to your face. A longer beard will do just the trick. “Avoid really short beards or stubble if you have a round face,” Thad advises. “It just highlights the fact that you don’t have a chin.”

Oblong/Rectangle Face. “With a rectangle face, you’ve got to be careful with a few things because the face is longer than it is wide,” Thad says. “You want to avoid hairstyles and beard styles that make your head look longer and skinnier” — i.e., the Beaker effect.

To that end, Thad recommends that those with rectangular faces choose shorter beards. Don’t let it go too far below your chin.

If you have a really thick full beard, feel free to let your beard grow out (not in terms of vertical length, but literally out); the thickness will give some needed width to your face and make it look more oval. 

Square Face. The square-shaped face is a classically masculine face shape. You want to avoid beard styles that make your face look wider. “Guys with square-shaped faces can’t go wrong with keeping their beard and hairstyle closely cropped. Think Jason Statham: buzz cut and stubble. It’s a really good look,” Thad says.

Diamond Face. Men with a diamond-shaped face have wide cheekbones but narrow jaw and brow lines. “A nice full beard can expand the skinny jawline on a diamond-shaped face,” Thad told me. “Combine that with a haircut that adds some width to your forehead, and your diamond-shaped face is starting to look more like that ideal oval.”

Triangle Face. Triangular faces start with a wide jawline, narrow a bit at the cheekbones, and then narrow even more at the forehead. Thad recommends that men with triangle-shaped faces avoid beards altogether. “A beard will just make your already wide jaw look wider and make your forehead look even more narrow and pointy,” he says. If you want facial hair, just go with some stubble. 

If You Want a Fancy Beard, Show Your Barber a Picture of What You Want

With the guidelines above, you’ll be able to pick a beard style that will look good on you. As with most things in life, you can never go wrong with keeping it simple.

But if you’re not satisfied with a simple beard style and want something fancy that you’ve seen on the internet, Thad recommends just showing your barber a picture of what you’re going for: 

Most barbers have no clue what a French Fork or Verdi is, so just show them a picture of it. And if they’re a good barber, they’ll let you know if that style would even look good on you.

There you go. How to pick the best beard style for you. Save the weird names for Red Dead Redemption, which, by the way, is a dang cool game.

_______________

Thanks to Thad from Hudson / Hawk Barber & Shop (locations in Springfield, Columbia, and Kansas City, MO, and Bentonville, AR) for his tips.

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

Note: Make sure to read our article on how to grow a beard.

While the hair on top of your head tends to get more grooming and maintenance attention, the hair on your face needs some TLC too. But the myriad beardly products, from special oils to specific combs, that have exploded onto the market in the last decade have created a confusing landscape. Does the average beard-wearer even need that stuff? And if not, what does an effective but minimal facial hair grooming routine look like? 

As with many of our hair styling and grooming pieces, Thad Forrester of Hudson / Hawk Barber & Shop provided some expertise on the topic. 

Why You Need to Care for Your Facial Hair

Taking time to tend to your facial hair has a couple important benefits. 

First, it makes your beard and/or mustache look better. When you try to get away with no grooming whatsoever, the hair on your face will look scraggly and disheveled — just as when you don’t shower or wash/groom the hair on your head. Many gents will wake up in the morning with “bed beard” — the facial equivalent of bed head — where your beard hair is stuck in one place after sleeping on it all night. Even with a short-ish full beard like mine, it’s noticeable when the hair is all slanting in one direction; it looks haphazard and unprofessional. You wouldn’t leave the house with a mess of greasy hair going in five different directions; don’t do the same with your facial hair. Your beard is part of the first impression you make, so you want it to be on point.

Second, grooming your facial hair is also about taking care of the skin underneath that hair. Men are notoriously bad at skin care anyway, so this facet of grooming tends to get rather overlooked. Which is unfortunate, as the skin under your beard is more sensitive and less resilient than that on your head. In tending to it, Thad says, “The main goal is to prevent dry, itchy skin and undue buildup of oils.” By keeping your facial hair clean, and moisturizing the skin underneath it, you can keep your beard comfortable rather than scratchy. 

A Quick Rundown on Products

While the products for one’s beard aren’t as numerous as those for your hair, it’s still a big market with a lot of confusing options. Here’s the lowdown: 

Beard oil. The product you’re likely most familiar with — at least in terms of what you see in stores and hipster social media channels. Beard oil is just that — an oil base which often has essential oils added in for scent (if you’re not a fan of having a strong scent literally right under your nose all day, there are also fragrance-free options).

Beard oil is great for conditioning and moisturizing both the skin and the hair itself (which is often drier than the hair on your head), and adds some shine to your beard as well. As it doesn’t offer any styling control, beard oil is best for guys who have beards that naturally grow in a pleasing shape and lay nicely on the face. But if you’re not in that category, it can still come in handy as a secondary conditioning option. 

Beard balm. Balm is often going to be found in a tin, and whether it’s called “conditioning” or “styling” balm, the effect is similar: it will moisturize while also providing some shaping ability. If your beard is a bit scraggly, you can tamp down the flyaways — the individual hairs that seem to stick straight out for no reason — with balm. It tends to have a butter base, generally mango or shea. Other oils and scents are mixed in as well. Thad prefers balm even though beard oil gets more attention, as it’s easier to transport (since it’s not a liquid) and far less messy (since it’s not an oil). 

When it comes to “conditioning” versus “styling,” which is how some beard balms will be categorized, it’s generally just a matter of thickness. Conditioning balms are slightly less thick and offer less shaping control; styling balms are slightly thicker and offer more control. 

Beard/mustache wax. Waxes are a step up from even balms in terms of thickness and shaping control. Unless you’re a very serious beardsman who deliberately shapes his facial hair into a specific style on a regular basis, you don’t really need wax. If that’s you, however, wax will be your best friend; the stuff is like glue. 

Beard shampoo/conditioner. Are beard-specific shampoos really any different from the stuff that’s made for the top of your head? It depends on the quality of the product. Cheap shampoos and conditioners are often rife with chemicals. But, you may not always notice depending on how sensitive your scalp is. On your face, however, you may indeed notice that your beard gets especially itchy or irritated.

If the shampoo/conditioner you use for your head hair is a high-quality product with fewer chemicals, it’s fine to use on your facial hair too. “Always look at the ingredient list!” advises Thad; in general, you want to avoid any type of “sulfate,” which is harmful for both hair and scalp. As with a lot of things you ingest and/or use on your body, the more pronounceable, recognizable the ingredients, the better. 

Beard shampoos and conditioners are generally made with higher quality ingredients; that’s why they ain’t cheap. You won’t find “Fructis Beard” on any store shelves. If you don’t mind the cheap stuff for your head, it’s best to get a beard-specific shampoo and conditioner; you don’t use as much product as you do on your head, so it may be worth it.   

Beard combs and brushes. The concept of a beard brush or comb felt ridiculous to me before I started researching for this article. Now, I’m convinced that everyone with a beard should have one. With regular use, it will straighten the hair and keep it more organized, giving you a more polished look all around. You may not think you need that, and that your beard looks fine as is; I was in that camp until I used a comb for the first time myself and asked my wife what she thought. “Way better!” was the immediate response. That’s all it took to convince me; my guess is that you won’t realize how disorganized your beard hair is until you give it a good combing or brushing. 

So what’s the difference between brushes and combs? A brush is easier on shorter beards, but when the hair gets longer, a brush can get harder to use. That’s when a comb comes in handy. Brushes are better at distributing your facial oils and pulling them away from the skin, but if they become a pain to use, go for the comb. Again, while it feels a little silly to brush and comb your face, it’s worth it. 

Just be sure to get quality products. Real animal hair brushes are better for your hair/face, as are wooden combs; plastic can create some static frizz. 

Beard trimmers/scissors. A quality trimmer is a must for any aspiring beardsman. For years and years I rocked a cheap Norelco that felt a little bit like a rat gnawing on my face (much like Brett’s experience with electric razors). Once I dug into this topic though, I got an $80 Brio Beardscape and it’s been a game-changer. Not only do I know exactly how many minutes of trimming I have left in the battery (an incredibly useful bit of knowledge!), I can vary the blade speed and easily change size guards. Cheap versions don’t offer any of those benefits. My low-end Norelco lasted about 5 years; there’s no reason to think the Brio won’t last even longer. Well worth it in my book.  

You’ll also want a pair of sharp scissors to trim errant hairs or your mustache when it gets so long that it interferes with your eating. You could get a normal pair of barber’s scissors, but I prefer the smaller versions made for facial hair — they’re usually under 5” long and just easier to handle. 

Beard growth oils/supplements. Don’t buy these — whatever they claim, it’s malarkey. If anything about them works, it’s that they simply provide your skin the right environment for hair growth to flourish. If you’re trying to grow a beard, just eat a balanced diet to make sure you’re getting healthy doses of essential vitamins and minerals, and keep your skin happy by regularly washing and moisturizing. 

Determining Your Best Beard Care Routine  

Every beard is different, as is the skin underneath every beard. If you have a scraggly beard and dry skin, your routine will look different than someone with a greasy beard in a humid environment. The key is to pay attention to how your face feels. If it’s often itchy, use more balm/oil. If the hair is really scraggly, give it more balm and comb action. Below are some tips on the specifics: 

Washing. The first thing to think about is how often to wash your beard. Even though you’re likely showering every day (or at least more days than not), you don’t want to be washing your beard with shampoo/conditioner every day (nor the hair on your head, for that matter). Folks with dry skin or who live in especially dry environments shouldn’t be washing more than 1-2 times per week. Otherwise 2-3 times per week is good. 

Moisturizing. Thad likes to apply some oil or balm right out of the shower and let it soak for a few minutes. If you don’t need any shaping, you might be good with just that step. Can be re-applied throughout the day — doing it in the morning and evening is a great routine to get into to keep your beard hair and skin happy. 

Shaping. If you shower in the morning, your beard will likely need a little less help in the shaping department. Still give it a brushing or combing, though, to get tangles out. Then apply balm to keep the flyaways down; you don’t want to have a fuzzball face while going about your day. Brush/comb again after applying the balm to make sure it gets evenly distributed and to shape the beard as desired. 

If you shower later in the day and need a presentable beard before then, it may take a little more work, including some wetting down and/or utilizing a stronger styling balm.

Trimming. You’ll likely trim with the small scissors 1-3 times per week — chipping away at long hairs or loners growing in weird places. Your routine will vary according to what your beard does.  

How often you need to give your whole beard a trim really depends on how fast your hair grows and how long a beard you’re going for. It’s best to trim your beard dry; water or oil will do funny things and your beard may not look how you intended it to once it dries. That way, you can also hop in the shower right afterwards and wash away the little hairs that inevitably get stuck all over. 

When using an electric trimmer, you want to start with the largest size guard and work your way down. You don’t want to accidentally trim off way more than you meant to and put weeks or months of growing down the drain. Those size guards only go so big, though — depending on the length of your beard, you may need to use scissors for the whole thing.  

You can, of course, also head to your local barbershop for a beard trim. It’s a delightful experience. 

Wrapping It Up 

That’s really all it takes. A couple products, a simple routine, and your beard will be happier for it. 

Use what your beard and the skin underneath it needs, and know that figuring that out will probably take some experimenting. Your skin and hair will react differently to different products. Be willing to try things out and buy small sizes at first. Once you find something you like and that keeps things looking and feeling good, get into the habit of regular maintenance and you’ll be set. 

___________________

Thanks to Thad from Hudson / Hawk Barber & Shop (locations in Springfield, Columbia, and Kansas City, MO, and Bentonville, AR) for his tips.

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

I’ve sported a mustache for almost a decade. I grew my first mustache back in 2009 for Movember. I thought it would just be a fun, temporary thing for a good cause. As soon as Movember was over, I was going to shave it off.

But I didn’t.

Because I thought I looked pretty damn good with a mustache. It suited me. Even the Mrs., much to her surprise, thought I looked dashing with a cookie duster too.

So the mustache has stayed perched above my lip ever since.

I’ve shaved it off two times during the past ten years for kicks and giggles. It freaked my kids out. My youngest actually cried when I came into the room clean shaven. Kate wasn’t pleased. The mustache was back a month later.

Over the years, I’ve had men ask me for tips on growing a mustache themselves. Really, there’s not much to it. You just don’t shave over your lip for a month. The men who ask me this question already know that. What they’re typically trying to get at when they ask about how to grow a mustache is how to do it in a way that doesn’t look creepy or upset their wives.

Those are trickier questions.

Below I offer some answers, as well as general advice on growing and sporting a killer stache.

Grow a beard for two or three weeks. A lot of guys don’t grow mustaches because they want to avoid looking creepy during those first few weeks when their nascent mustache is first emerging. I get it. Having a clean shaven face with a thin, patchy line of hair above your lip isn’t a good look. It makes you look like that one smelly dude in middle school who hit puberty earlier than everyone else or a creepy McCreepsalot.

To avoid this awkward early mustache phase, skip it all together by growing a beard for the first 2-4 weeks.

For some reason, people are a bit more charitable with your new facial hair if you look like a wino sprouting a full beard rather than a creeper sprouting a mustache alone. So just grow a nicely kept beard for a few weeks until the hair above your lip is full and thick enough to stand on its own. Then shave off all the hair around it. 

No, there’s nothing you can do to grow your mustache faster or thicker. There are vitamins and supplements out there that claim to make your hair grow faster and thicker, but the evidence and reviews of them are very mixed. And they’re invariably expensive, and almost assuredly not worth it. How fast or thick your facial hair grows is almost wholly dependent on genetics. So just take a cheap multivitamin, eat a balanced diet, and be patient as you wait for your stache to grow in.  

Experiment with mustache styles. You’ll need to experiment with different styles to find the one that suits your face. There’s no hard and fast rules for matching mustache styles to face types. Just go with the one that looks good on you. I’ve settled on a 1980s Magnum, P.I.-inspired stache. It works for me.

Check out our illustrated guide to mustache styles for some inspiration.

What if I grew a mustache and it doesn’t look good on me?

Then the mustache just isn’t in the cards for you. That’s okay. Plenty of people have had kickass lives without a mustache. You can too. You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em. And know when to shave ‘em. Don’t try to force the stache.

Maintain your mustache. Once you’ve settled on a mustache style, it’s just a matter of maintaining it. Once a week I trim my mustache. If I’m feeling sassy, I’ll put some beard oil in it. I don’t think it does all that much. But it smells nice.

Be prepared for getting compliments from other dudes. Here’s a weird thing I’ve noticed about having a mustache: I get lots of compliments from dudes on it.

“That’s a killer stache man!”

“I wish I could grow a mustache like that.”

“Man, the mustache is a good look for you.”

I’m not sure what’s going on there. My guess is the mustache is a bold facial hair statement, and dudes admire the chutzpah it takes to pull it off.

I don’t get many compliments from ladies, unless they’re in their 60s or 70s.

What if my wife won’t let me grow a mustache!?

So you want to grow a mustache, but your wife/girlfriend is opposed.

Well, you could just grow it anyway; it’s your face, after all.

But this is a relational area where it behooveth you to broker a compromise. After all, you may look at your mug in the mirror a few times a day, but she’s looking at it for hours on end. And she’s got to put her lips right under that furry caterpillar, and you want her to want to.

Here’s the thing: women assume they don’t like mustaches based on their abstract conceptions of mustaches in general, not an actual mustache, on you. She’s never seen a mustache on you, and when she does, it might change her mind.

So here’s my advice: wait til Movember or No Shave November, and say you’re growing out your beard/mustache for charity. No one can argue with such a noble, philanthropic aim. After the month is over, keep the stache and see what she says. As it’s been growing on you, it may have grown on her. She may find that the stache has increased your sexual attractiveness and tiger energy by 672%.

If not, well, the decision is back to being on you. You can make your stand and keep it. Or not. Just depends on how often you want to get Frenched, I guess.

Wear your mustache; don’t let your mustache wear you. Even though your mustache may become a conversation starter, don’t let it become a primary part of your identity. It’s facial hair, not a calling card, a personality trait, or a reason for a social media post. It’s part of your personal presentation and style, sure, but it should be no more of who you are than whether you rock a crew cut or mop top haircut.  

There you go. How to grow a mustache. Grow a beard, shave everything but the mustache a few weeks later, maintain mustache, bask in compliments from random dudes.  

The mustache life is indeed the good life.

Related Resources

• How to Grow a Handlebar Mustache
• How to Trim a Mustache: Illustrated Guide
• Mustache Style Guide
• Manliest Mustaches of All-Time

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

1. Trim your mustache weekly. First comb dry mustache with fine toothed mustache comb. When wet, hair can appear longer, leading you to cut off too much.
2. Using mustache scissors or electric trimmer, trim first for shape, cutting along bottom of mustache and then outer edges. Work from middle towards one side, then to the other side and back to middle. Look straight ahead and maintain a neutral face to get smooth, even line.
3. Now trim for length. Comb through mustache and cut hair on outside of mustache comb to desired length. Trim conservatively at first. If using electric trimmer, move from longer to shorter guides. You can always trim off more, but you can’t add it back after you’ve clipped it.
4. Comb through your mustache one last tie and clip any hairs you may have missed.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

The ability to grow a beard is what separates boys from men and except for a few rare instances of bearded ladies, men from women. Because it’s a uniquely masculine feature, facial hair has played an important role in forming our ideas about manhood. Today on the show, I talk to a cultural historian who specializes in the history of facial hair about the cultural, political, and religious history of the beard. His name is Christopher Oldstone-Moore and in his latest book Of Beards and Men he takes readers on a tour through the history of facial hair starting with cavemen and going all the way to the hipster beard of the 21st century. 

We begin our conversation talking about why male humans grow beards in the first place and then take a look at the spiritual and political significance of beards and shaving beginning with the ancient Sumerians through medieval Europeans. We then discuss why the Greeks were big on beards until Alexander the Great and why the Ancient Romans were bare-faced until the days of the early empire. We also discuss Jesus’ beard and why many early Christians actually depicted him as clean shaven. We end our conversation talking about the great beards of the 19th century, why clean shaveness took precedence in the 20th (and no, it’s not because of the military’s use of gas masks) and the cultural meanings of facial hair today. Whether you’re bearded or bare-faced, this podcast is going to leave you with lots of new insights about the hair that grows on your masculine mug.

Show Highlights

• How a professor of Western civilization came to specialize in facial hair
• Christopher’s own feelings on being bearded
• Why humans have facial hair in the first place
• Why did men start shaving?
• The signals that a large and lengthy beard sent in the ancient world
• Why having your beard forcibly shaved off was a humiliating punishment
• Why shaving came to represent godliness and power
• How Roman emperor Hadrian ushered in the first resurgence of the beard
• The history and portrayals of Jesus’ beard
• Beardedness in the Middle Ages
• The up and down nature of the popularity of facial hair throughout various historical ages
• Why Romanticism embraced the beard faster than any other era
• How facial hair came to have a bit of a generational divide
• How Abraham Lincoln’s beard came to be
• The cultural significance of the mustache — especially in the military
• The perfect storm of science, culture, and corporate work environments that led to the clean-shaven men of the 20th century
• What’s the status of the beard today?
• The role of the beard in society today

Resources/People/Articles Mentioned in Podcast

• How to Grow a Beard
• Shaving Rituals from Around the World
• The Science of Facial Hair: What Signals Do Beards Send?
• The 35 Manliest Mustaches of All-Time
• The 12 Most Infamous Mustaches of All-Time
• Advice on Being a Man from 8 Neighborhood Barbers
• Mid-1800s Punch Magazine cartoon lampooning facial hair
• Art of Manliness Mustache Style Guide

Of Beards and Men is utterly fascinating. After you’re done reading it, you’ll never look at beards the same way. Pick up a copy on Amazon.

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Podcast Sponsors

The Illustrated Art of Manliness. The Greatest Father’s Day Gift of All Time. OF. ALL. TIME.

The Black Tux. Online no-hassle tux rentals with free shipping. Get $20 off by visiting theblacktux.com/manliness.

Buck Mason. Classic, American staples like tees, henleys, and jeans sent directly to your door. Visit buckmason.com/manliness to get FREE shipping on your first Crew Slub Tee.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Well, the ability to grow a beard is what separates boys from men, and except for a few rare instances of bearded ladies, men from women. Because it’s a uniquely masculine feature, facial hair has played an important role in forming our ideas about manhood. Today on the show I talk to a cultural historian who specializes in the history of facial hair, to discuss the cultural, political and religious implication of the beard. His name is Christopher Oldstone-Moore and in his book Of Beards and Men he takes readers on a tour through the history of facial hair starting with cavemen and going all the way to the hipster beard of the 21st century.

We begin our conversation talking about why male humans grow beards in the first place and then take a look at the spiritual and political significance of beards and shaving beginning with the ancient Sumerians and going all the way through medieval Europeans. We then discuss why the Greeks were big on beards until Alexander the Great and why the Ancient Romans were bare-faced until the days of the early empire. We also discuss Jesus’ beard and why many early Christians actually depicted him as clean shaven. We end our conversation talking about the great beards of the 19th century, why clean shave-ness took precedence in the 20th century (and no, it’s not because of the military’s use of gas masks) and the cultural meanings of facial hair today. Whether you’re bearded or bare-faced, this podcast is going to leave you with lots of insights about the hair that grows on your masculine mug. After the show is over, check out the show notes at aom.is/beards.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore, welcome to the show.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: So you recently published a book, Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair. You’re a Professor of Western Civilization and it says in your CV that you have a focus on facial hair and it’s intersection with the changing ideas of masculinity. I’m curious, how does a Professor of Western Civilization end up specializing in the history of facial hair?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Well, the short answer to that question is that I’m looking for fun things to put into my lectures of Social History. Actually it started out with the question of why men did shave? That’s the original question and I was thinking about the Romans in the Classical Period of Julius Caesar and so forth and all their busts are all shaven men and I thought, “When did that start? How did that get going and is that a Roman thing?” So I started looking around trying to find some information and was pretty surprised to find that we, that is to say academia, knew almost nothing about the history of shaving, facial hair and it was just completely overlooked and so I got more and more interested in it. Then I fell completely into the rabbit hole.

Brett McKay: And here we are today. Do you yourself have a beard or do you shave?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: You know, I go back and forth. Right now I do have a beard. I often have a beard during the summertime when I’m camping and so forth and so on. Sometimes I shave it off. I guess I’m indecisive and in my book I have a picture of both me, beard and not bearded, but it also reflects history, that’s the way history’s worked too.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about the question why do humans have beards in the first place? Cuz you point out other primates don’t have copious amounts of facial hair like we do. Do biologists have an idea why humans evolved to have facial hair?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Well it’s a great conundrum and it’s been debated for decades. There are a lot of good reasons but we can’t be dead sure because it’s impossible to recreate the conditions of about 50,000 years ago or so when these things evolved, but I think that the predominate theory is still Darwin’s idea that beards in an ornament. That is to say they are to demonstrate a man’s maturity, health, strength, those kinds of qualities that would make him a good sexual partner, and therefore is an ornament, a signal to sexual partners that he’s the kind of guy that you want.

There’s a lot of interesting evidence of that, both in psychological research, but also in other, microbiological research and for example, the study of animals and the comparisons say with feathers. There’s an obvious ornament case, and bird females look at males and look at their plumage and the bigger the better the plumage, the more interested they are. Biologists are thinking, “Well, maybe that’s what we’re doing with the beards too.” Here’s the interesting part, they debate about whether why is this happening? Why do birds grow these ridiculous feathers like the peacock, for example.

They discovered that really it’s what they call ‘honest advertising’. That is to say it really does take a healthy peacock to grow impressive feathers and so when you see impressive feathers, when a female bird sees impressive feathers, it’s not just a trick, it’s the real thing, that bird is a healthy bird, so it’s a good sexual partner. So maybe if you have a big healthy beard, that’s a good sign.

Brett McKay: Right, right. Yeah, the other theory I’ve heard out there is that it’s selection for, I guess the beard somehow provided protection to hits to the face. I’ve heard that theory also as well but-

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Well, biologists don’t pay much attention to that. There isn’t really much evidence of that. When you think about it, if beards were meant to be thick, protecting important parts of your neck or your face or anything like that, it wouldn’t grow the way it does. I think people have noticed, for example, a lot of people say “Oh, it protects your neck,” well, it doesn’t actually grow on your neck, you know. It grows on your face, it grows on your chin and does your chin need protection? Where it’s thickest is on the chin, does your chin need protection? Not particularly.

What does impress evolutionary biologists is the fact that the chin, around the mouth, our human chins are actually artificially enlarged for visual effect. To look impressive, to look strong, our mouth area is something that we use to threaten people with, our teeth and to have an impressive chin, an impressive face, impressive mouth, is intimidating, it looks strong and that’s the other part of the theory is that not only is it an ornament, but it could be a weapon. That is to say it shows how threatening and strong we are, and so it’s a warning to other men as well as an attraction to women, so it can kind of serve both roles.

Brett McKay: Okay, if beards, under this theory, if they’re sort of as an ornament of attraction for women and possibly a deterrent to other men, why did humans start shaving and when did they start shaving?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Yeah, exactly, good question, I mean, that’s kind of where I started this whole thing. You think of ancient people as being big-bearded people. Ancients Greeks, the ancient Mesopotamians and so forth, the Syrians. Actually shaving really starts right at the beginning of civilization, as far back as we can look and probably before.

One of the reasons to do that, to shave it, is to indicate a different kind, a special kind, of masculinity, not an ordinary, natural kind that we’re born as, but something that we make ourselves into. The most special form of masculinity that the ancient world was the priesthood. Which, there’s a joke about prostitution, prostitutes are the original professionals, but the truth is that the priests were the original professionals. They were the first people to be set aside for a special task, very important, special task. That special task was to interact with the gods and to win their favor on behalf of all the rest of us.

It took special preparation and training and skills. As part of that separation and preparation, they developed this idea of shaving. Now, I think it’s pretty clear that one has to be in mind that these early priests, and we’re going back 5,000 years ago, these early priests in Mesopotamia and Egypt, they shaved their entire bodies, not just their faces. All the hair was removed and in many cases, they appeared nude in front of the gods, so they removed their clothing, they removed their hair. I think the idea is to purify themselves, in some ways erase their dirty humanity and to prepare themselves to be as clean and as pure as possible as they approach the gods.

You read this in the Bible, and all the temples had purification pools where you had to go through a ritual cleansing before you approach the holy sanctuary. A shaving of hair and ultimately, shaving the beards off, originated there with that idea of purification.

Brett McKay: So while that was going on though, in ancient Mesopotamia and in Egypt, the beard still played an important roles in a man’s identity. If you look at those old carvings from Mesopotamia, you see these guys with their ginormous beards. The ancient Egyptians would put on fake beards, sort of that little strip, right? So what’s going on there? You had the priesthood who saw facial hair as making them somehow un-pure, but then also at the same time you had these kings who said, “No, the facial hair makes me awesome and maybe god-like, too.”

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Well, and you kind of have a separation of roles, different types of masculinity, so you have the priestly masculinity, and that’s a certain kind of power and then you have the warrior masculinity and that’s a different kind of power. Not surprisingly, they have different looks and it goes back to what I suggested about this idea of the beard as a weapon, as a threat. You look impressive, you look strong, so yeah, a lot of the ancient kings loved the big beard as a sign of their warrior prowess and even they would insist that the king’s beard had to be the longest. At least in art, because that suggests that he is the most war-like, the most manly.

So there’s a different role there and so what I have fun with in the book is that there’s a moment in that history of Mesopotamia in about 100 years span, maybe 150 years, there was a dynasty that was sort of trying to play it both ways, where the king would in some cases appear shaved like a priest doing his priestly duties, cuz kings had priestly roles as well. Then at other times, in other places, he would appear with his, as you say, ginormous beard. It’s a little hard to tell whether he actually brought a fake beard or whatever, but it’s certainly in art, in official art, he was shown two different ways depending on what his role was.

Brett McKay: All right, well, we’re going to see this dichotomy show up throughout the rest of Western history, but I think it’s interesting too, you point out, for those who have read the Old Testament and other ancient Near East texts, the act of forcibly shaving a man’s beard off was one of the worst things you could do. Why was that such a terrible offense? Why was it often used as a way to punish a man?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Yeah, there’s a couple famous scenes about that. David’s ambassadors are described as being humiliated that way by a king. I think that by that time, by the time of the Old Testament, the beard had become a symbol of masculine honor and patriarchal pride and as a symbol of that, it could be symbolically used against you. It could be removed and then you’re shamed, publicly shamed.

The David’s ambassadors story, the ambassadors are so embarrassed that they have to stay away from Jerusalem for several weeks while their beards grow again and only then they can feel comfortable enough to actually return to their families and to their homes after this humiliation, so yes, it’s a real thing, because it has become strongly connected with the honor of manhood itself.

Brett McKay: Right and because of that connection to the honor of manhood, you’d often hear ancient people swear by their beard.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Right, throughout medieval too, that was reintroduced in medieval times by a lot of medieval kings as well, yeah.

Brett McKay: Now, let’s move on to Ancient Greece. What role did the beard play amongst the Greeks?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Well, the Greeks start out by being like the Hebrews. They believed that beards are part of manly honor. They do have a patriarchal society and they honor the patriarch and his great beard. It’s very important and men who have inadequate beards or even were effeminate and shaved them were more often humiliated in public, but something happened during classical times and we’re talking about the 5th century, the time we often think about when we think about ancient Athens.

Something was happening and what was happening was that artists were thinking of how to represent the gods in a new way and they came up with the idea of representing the immortal quality of the gods as youthful, nude men and women. The gods were youthful and nude and the idea is, in a sense, to imitate something that they came up with in their funeral arrangements. They would erect these statues, they started putting up these statues to important men who’d died and these statues were nude, youthful figures.

The idea was to represent immortality. In a sense, think about the human life cycle and when are we most alive, most fully alive? Mature, but not old? That’s what I want to say. Where’s that point in life where we’re mature, but not old, not decayed? They decided that that would be like 18-19 years old, when you’re mature, but not at all old or decayed and that’s the peak of life. So they liked to represent that. No matter how old you were, if you were a 75 year old man and you died, you’d get a statue that looks like you’re 19.

They did that in art more and more. Then when Alexander the Great took over Greece, this is in the 300s B.C., he took over Greece and then conquered the Persian Empire and established Greece as the dominant culture of the whole area. He started to make himself look like the art. Cuz he thought of himself as a demigod. He wanted to look immortal. Luckily, he was young, he was very young, but he shaved his beard, unlike his father and unlike the other Greeks at the time to look like a god. Then everyone thought, “Oh, yeah, that’s a great look.”

Then the Greeks, the Hellenistic Era, the Greeks, after that, all the respectable men shaved and then barbers, the whole profession of barbering took off and then the Romans picked it up later when they adopted Greek ways. So that answers my question that I had originally is “Why did the Romans shave?” Well, they shaved cuz the Greeks shaved. Why did the Greeks shave? They shaved because Alexander the Great wanted to look like a god.

Brett McKay: So it all goes back to that dichotomy of facial hair being sort of earthy, natural man, no facial hair being divine.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Exactly, there’s your divide again. It’s similar to what was going on earlier, where shaving represents a different kind of masculinity that’s beyond the natural. It’s refined, it’s special, it’s extraordinary.

Brett McKay: You know it’s interesting, that dichotomy. I think whenever the people depicted Achilles, he was often without a beard later.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Right, later. Earlier he had a beard, in art and then later he didn’t.

Brett McKay: But the exception of the gods with no facial hair, Zeus was often portrayed with a beard still, right?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore:    Right. Zeus is probably the only guy who kept his beard throughout. I mean, even the Greeks couldn’t imagine Zeus without a beard. But funny one that I like to think about is Heracles, or Hercules. Now here’s the He-Man of ancient Greece, the ultimate He-Man. He was a demigod, by the way, he was half god, half human. It was fun to watch him transition in art because here’s the ultimate He-Man, so he keeps his beard a lot longer than the other gods, or demigods, like Achilles, but even he loses his beard by Alexander’s time. Even Hercules, the He-Man of ancient Greece, is beardless.

Brett McKay: Beardless, all right. Continue on with the Romans, you see a lot of the busts of the ancient Romans, most of the Emperors clean-shaven. But then there was Hadrian, and he decided, “I’m going to start growing a beard.” Why did he start growing a beard? What was going on there?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Yeah, that’s what I call the first beard movement. We have 400 years of shaving, where shaving is expected by men of power, and then after 400 years, Hadrian changes his mind and changes everyone else’s mind as well and starts a movement towards beards. He’s inspired by the philosophers, particularly the stoics, and the idea here is the stoics believe that wisdom is following the laws of nature, the universal laws of nature. They’re argument is nature gave man a beard and gave man a beard for a purpose and that purpose was to show that a man is a man, I’m not a woman. If you shave off your beard, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to become a woman, what is that?

Hadrian was one of these Roman Generals, then Emperor who loved Greek learning and really took philosophy very seriously and studied, personally, with some of the top philosophers. No doubt he had these lectures, heard these lectures about beards and said, “You know what? That’s right, I’m a man of wisdom and I’m going to follow the universal laws of nature and I want to model that for the rest of my society.” So he proudly returns to Rome from Greece with a beard and then when he becomes Emperor, that’s it. That sets the tone.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you start seeing like Marcus Aurelius had a beard and he was also a stoic, a stoic philosopher. Let’s talk about one of the most famous bearded men in history who was around the time of Romans. It’s Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth. Today, Jesus is portrayed as having a beard all the time. That’s what we think when we think of Jesus, but you show that that wasn’t always the case during the history of Christianity. Can you talk about the beardiness and non-beardiness of Jesus throughout the early days of Christianity?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Well what we sometimes forget is that the early Christians lived in the Roman Empire and the period that we were just talking about. For a lot of that time … here’s what I got to start with: After Hadrian’s time, shaving comes back in the late Roman Empire and shaving comes back because there’s a sort of a revival of the old style as they tried to keep their empire together and the old style of Caesar and Augustus and so forth.

So shaving is back, if you will. In that time, when Christianity’s really taking off in the Roman world, the early Christians are Romans. They might be Greek speaking, but they’re Roman citizens and their imagery, when they create art and when they imagine Jesus as the Savior, they connect him, quite naturally, with images that they have in their classical culture. Images of Hermes, the Shepherd God, so Jesus is the Shepherd, the Good Shepherd, so they think of Hermes and Hermes is always represented as this young, beardless man.

Or they think of him as Apollo, the god of wisdom and so forth, and so they have all these images of these youthful, beardless immortals and for hundreds of years they presented Jesus in art that way, cuz that’s the visual imagery that they had. It wasn’t till really after the fall of the Roman Empire and the fading away of these old classical ideas and images that Jesus then is reimagined as a bearded man. It’s true that Jesus was almost certainly bearded in real life, but that isn’t why we depict him as bearded. We depict him as bearded because we developed an artistic iconography.

By the way, Jesus always has long hair. Did you ever wonder about that? Why does Jesus always have this long, flowing hair? As well as that beard. That was just part of the iconography of how his image was developed in the early Middle Ages. It’s a holdover, by the way, it’s a holdover from classical times, when long, flowing hair was considered to be part of your youthful vitality.

Brett McKay: That’s interesting. You also point out, in these early depictions, later on, when they’re transitioned from that classical, youthful notion of Jesus, divine Jesus, to the bearded Jesus, there’d be artwork where there would be a bearded Jesus and a non-bearded Jesus portrayed in the same scene.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: As this iconography is morphing and people are experimenting. “How could we do this?” There was actually a period there where they were both going at the time and artists would be using both. They would typically use beardless Jesus as the Jesus that was on Earth and traveling around and teaching and gathering disciples and performing miracles and then use the bearded Jesus to represent that special last time of his life. The entry into Jerusalem, the passion, the death and resurrection. There really is two Jesus’ when you think about it. There’s the Jesus, the teacher, the miracle-worker, and then there’s the Jesus of the passion and the resurrection.

They would sometimes say, “Well, we could kind of think of him as looking different for those different times.” That got me thinking that artists were really going for is they were creating contrast, so when Jesus is on earth among ordinary bearded men, he’s beardless to represent how different he is. He’s the divine figure on Earth. He’s like an angel who has descended from Heaven, among men. But when he’s ready to enter Heaven, when he goes through his passion and becomes God and not man, and ascends to Heaven, now he’s in Heaven and surrounded by beardless angels and spirits, and here he’s now depicted more typically as having a beard.

I think that’s, again, a contrast so that we’re reminded that although he’s in Heaven, and he’s God, he’s also a man and he has a beard. He’s not an angel. He’s not a spirit in that sense. He still retains his manhood with him even as he sits on the throne of Heaven. I think that’s what they were playing with their imagery and that image of the bearded Jesus in Heaven became kind of the standard look.

Brett McKay: We had this first beard movement during the Roman Era with Hadrian. Then the late Emperor started shaving again to kind of reclaim that kind of classical notion. What happened after the fall of the Roman Empire as we entered into the Middle Ages? Did the clean-shaven look continue?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Well, it did. There was a bit of a breakdown, as you imagine, in cultural and civilization. The church was mostly Roman and Latin-speaking. The church leaders tried to limit the growth of hair. They really enforced short hair. Short, cropped hair, because the New German barbarians that had taken over all around Western Europe were notoriously long-haired and long-bearded. We do have kind of a bearded era here, but the church is resisting, especially in Western Europe, because they want to contrast themselves with the hairy Germans.

That eventually develops into a full-blown anti-hair attitude and that contrast that they start to establish right away in the 500s expands so by the 700s they’re starting to shave the top of their head, that’s what we call the Tonsure, where they make a bald spot on the top of their head. They started that in the 700s and then the monks started shaving their faces as well as shaving the tops of their heads and then that eventually was adopted by the priesthood as a whole and by the 10th and 11th centuries, so you’re getting into more of the middle of the Middle Ages, you have a really strong contrast between clergy and laity.

The clergy are shaving the tops of their heads, shaving their faces but the aristocracy has sort of maintained this Germanic tradition of beards and hair. So you have a real striking contrast between two types of masculinity and what we’ve done is we’ve recreated what happened in the ancient period that I described earlier where the priesthood was shaved and kings, warriors, were hairy. Then there we are again, we’re back to it in the Middle Ages.

In fact, so much so, that the church built it into canon law. That is to say by the 11th century, it was part of canon law. You could actually, if you were a priest and you refused to shave your face, you would be excommunicated, thrown out of the church. They were pretty serious about it.

Brett McKay: But what was funny, you point this out too, is you had the kings, the aristocracy, held on to their beards, or their pagan beards, and then the priests shaving, but the kings would often make fun of the priests as sort of like, “You guys are womanly, cuz you don’t have a beard.” So the priests developed this idea of the inner beard, like, “Hey, we’re still manly. We have a beard on the inside that you can’t see.”

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Right, well it was the great ideological confrontation of the Middle Ages was the conflict of what was called the two swords, the two kinds of power, divine power and worldly power. The sword of faith, the sword of the flesh. That was the great conflict the entire Middle Ages and the Popes and bishops battled with kings for authority and predominance. It was a back and forth thing and both sides would accuse the other of being inadequate.

The church would say “Your beards are representative of your worldliness and of your sin,” so they could throw it back at them. Yeah, so they were very proud of their ‘inner beard’ where they’re growing a manhood of faith and discernment and purity, whereas the world men are lost.

Brett McKay: Right. I don’t know if you ever saw Dexter’s Laboratory, it was a cartoon. There was a scene where Dexter, he’s a kid, he wants to grow a beard, so he puts on a fake beard and this big-bearded guy tells him, “It’s not the beard on the outside that counts, it’s the beard on the inside that counts.”

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Ah, I didn’t know that, that’s great.

Brett McKay: When I read that bit about the inner beard, reminded me of Dexter’s Laboratory. We did the Middle Ages, pretty much a battle between beardiness and non-beardiness, but primarily clean-shaven because of the predominance of the priesthood and the church during that era.

But during the Renaissance, there was another beard movement. So what was going on there? Why did people embrace the beard?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Yeah, and just have to do a preamble to that and that’s that the beard falls away in the 13-1400s because the churchly standard of shaving becomes adopted by the laity as well. We have the triumph of shaving for at least 150 years there and that’s sets us up for another beard movement then in the 1500s and the height of the Renaissance. This is a deliberate reaction against the past. That’s what the Renaissance was. They invented that word. They said “We live in a different time, we’re going to rebirth, that is to say, we’re going to recreate or renovate our society. We are too stuck in medieval unworldliness, we’re too down on humanity.”

The humanists of the Renaissance were more optimistic and enthusiastic about human potential and they were ready to throw off both the spiritual and the actual real power of the church. A new class of worldly merchants, particularly in Italy, were ready to do this and part of that was the reinvention of a new worldly masculinity, embracing positively our natural humanity and rejecting the unworldliness of the church. Part of that was “Let’s embrace beards.”

So it’s kind of similar to what Hadrian had done, with the old philosopher, the stoic philosophy, is “Let’s embrace nature, let’s not reject nature. After all, medieval is about how corrupt nature is.” But the Renaissance is there’s beauty in nature and human nature’s good. So they’re embracing that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s so funny this pendulum that keeps going back and forth.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And then into the Enlightenment, shaving comes back again.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Yeah, well, you know, each time needs a different form of masculinity and the liberation of the Renaissance is all good and well, but for other reasons, not because of liberation as such, but that late Renaissance era, we call it, well, it was off of the Reformation and the age of religious wars, it became a very chaotic time in European. Disastrous time in many respects, the late 1500s, early 1600s were just terrible in social and political terms and so there was in a sense, too much freedom, too much disorder and so royal courts became the center of the effort to restore order and that means social as well as political order.

That meant a new kind of masculinity that needs to be more disciplined, more regulated and more cooperative, more peaceful. Part of that was this elaborate court ritual that was developed. Fancy clothes, fancy stockings, fancy wigs and of course, the eradication of all natural hair. When you wore those big wigs you see in the late 1600s, 1700s, when you wore those wigs, you shaved your head completely. You got to get rid of all your hair and then you put on this massive wig and then you shave off your natural hair so that it’s all controlled and very, very perfect, not unruly nature.

It’s a war against nature. So Renaissance you say “Let’s liberate nature!” And then you’re saying “Oh, too much nature, so let’s control it.” We’re going into a reaction again.

Brett McKay: All right, we had the reaction against that, but then, as we had the first beard movement with Hadrian, then the second beard movement during the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment-

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Well, you could call that the third because we had beards in the Medieval-

Brett McKay: Medieval times, right. But then there was another beard movement during the Romantic Era, which was a reaction against the Enlightenment Era, so I guess the Romantics were embracing nature once again and so that’s why you gotta grow a beard?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Right. Well, yeah, I think so. Romanticism and the beard were accepted by the extreme Romantics, the poets or the liberal-y students, the people were most animated by this exciting idea of liberal romantic ideas that were percolating after the Revolutionary Era of the end of the 18th century. But it never took off, it never became a movement as such because the authorities, the middle classes, and the monarchies and so forth that existed were afraid of Romanticism and afraid of liberal ideas, so they repressed it and it was socially unacceptable.

You had young people, kind of like the ’60s, you have young people espousing this radical new romantic poetry and dreaming about liberation and growing beards and the older, more powerful generation are saying “Oh, this is way too dangerous, we don’t like this. Beards are radical.” If you watch Les Misérables, or you read Les Misérables, there is discussion about the young men wearing beards.

But what happens is that there are a bunch of liberal revolutions led by romantic, bearded young men in 1848 all throughout Europe. France, Germany, Italy, but all those revolutions, if you can imagine like the 1960s, youth actually tried to overthrow the government. It collapsed because they were disorganized and didn’t have any leaders. So all that enthusiastic, political romanticism got kind of crushed in 1848 and 1849. So in the heap of wreckage of that romantic dream, the radical beard is dead and it was no available for all men, it was no longer a threat, so then more and more men experimented with mustaches and maybe longer sideburns and then “Why not a beard, yeah!”

So all of a sudden in 1850s, boom, the big fourth beard movement arrives and men embraced the idea of beards again. The fastest, most immediate, most sudden beard movement ever because I think men had been eager to grow beards for a long, long time and you see the muttonchops and the whiskers, the burnsides going down, down, down the side of the face, but they can’t bear to actually let it grow into a beard because then that would be radical. There’s all this pent up desire of men in the 19th century to grow their facial hair. Then finally when it’s safe in the 1850s, all of sudden, boom, everybody. It’s just like overnight.

I show a cartoon which shows a woman at a train station and these porters are coming to take her bags and they’re all big-bearded guys and she’s just scared to death cuz what in hell, you know, she thought she’s being attacked by thieves, robbers. There’s a sense of almost shock that all of a sudden everyone’s growing beards. It’s really hilarious.

Brett McKay: Right. Now we get some of the most famous beards, they’re very iconic from that period. Abraham Lincoln.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Right, right, but this is a decade later. He’s a late adopter, would I say.

Brett McKay: He’s a late adopter.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: He’s a late adopter and he’s very cautious, he’s a, first of all, he’s a lawyer and he’s a politician and these guys have to be very cautious about their public image. People say, “Join the beard movement, Abe.” And he said “Oh, that would be kind of over the top, don’t you think?” He’s very shy and then this little girl writes a letter to him during the campaign and mind you, he’s not campaigning. Presidents didn’t campaign in those days. He stayed at home, but letters come to him and a letter comes from a girl and she says “I saw your picture, your campaign picture, and we all agree that you would look so much better with a beard, you have such a thin face.” He ponders this, and he says “Well, I think it would affectation if I grew a beard now.”

That’s what he says to her, but he does in fact, grow his beard right then and there while he’s sitting home while the election’s going on, so that finally when he emerges after the election and takes the train to Washington, he’s a bearded man. He stops in Northern New York where that girl lived and asked for her by name to come up to him. She came to see him and he said to her “Look, I’ve followed your advice.”

Brett McKay: There you go, the rest was history. We’ve been talking about beards, but what of the mustache? It’s not a full beard, so it’s kind of like a compromise. Is there any cultural significance of the mustache throughout western history?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Yeah, well the mustache has a long, long history with aristocracy and therefore the military. I think the most important thing that developed was in that Romantic Era that I talked about, the Napoleonic Wars at the very beginning of the 19th century. Napoleon’s army and the other armies like the Prussians and the British, that were fighting the Napoleonic Wars, and the Austrians certainly, adopted a style which they thought was pretty awesome.

It was modeled on the look of the Hungarian Hussars. These are Hungarian cavalrymen who were part of the Austrian army, ultimately. They had these awesome look that comes from their history. They had these big bearskin caps, they had these leopard pelt saddles, they had ribbons and embroidery, they were colorful, they were dramatic, they had a curved saber sword and then they had this big, black mustache. The whole look was just awesome, it was original shock and awe, that these cavalrymen would come charging at you and you just run, you know, just at the sight of them.

That was the idea and the European armies adopted this because it was so awesome and this is the Napoleonic Wars. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, by 1815, all the European cavalrymen are looking like that and their army is drawing up new costume regulations or uniform regulations to adopt to this. Then more units want to do it. They say, “Wow, this is fantastic and we want to look good too.”

So it spreads to the other officer corps. By the middle of the 19th century, now all military units are excited about this and more and more units are permitted and by the middle of the 19th century, it’s actually become regulation in most European armies that all officers and even all enlisted men have to have a mustache as part of their military look. It’s a regulation, you must have a mustache.

In fact, a lot of young men, imagine an 18 year old recruit who’s got not very thick hair, maybe even blonde, and they can’t grow much of a mustache, they had to have a regulation black mustache. If you had a blonde mustache you had to color it. If you didn’t have a mustache you had to put something on, get a fake one because it was regulation, it was your costume. There’s all these complaints in newspapers, like “Oh, we’re not paid enough to get our good-quality fake mustaches.” There’s some fun stories about that.

Then that remains true all the way up to World War I. The French, the British, the Germans, the Austrians, they all required their soldiers to wear a mustache. I have the best accounts from the British Army because the British recruits were complaining that they didn’t want to have to wear a mustache. It was inconvenient to maintain it, to trim it and so forth, and what happened was that during the First World War, the British had to go to the draft in 1916.

When they instituted the draft, they realized they had a morale problem because a lot of the young recruits didn’t have mustaches, didn’t want to grow them and it wasn’t fashionable at the time, it wasn’t their image, they didn’t like it and so the Army, they actually had a court-martial, they started court-martialing men for not having mustaches. Then the higher officials started to rethink this and think “Is this really worth our time to court-martial men for not having mustaches when we’re asking them basically to be cannon fodder on the Western Front?”

They re-examined, re-evaluated and rescinded the order right in the middle of the War because court-martialing was not worthwhile. It coincides with the use of gas masks and so we tend to think that it’s gas masks that made mustaches go away, but that’s not true. You can fit a gas mask around a short mustache anyway. It was more an issue of morale.

Brett McKay: Right, so this begins the 20th century, the movement away from beards, from facial hair and we enter this age of clean-shavenness that we still see today.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Yeah, well, there are a bunch of reasons that kind of conspire a perfect storm right at the beginning of the 20th century to make this happen. We’re already moving away from beards, the younger generation wants a slicker look and mustaches are actually really the look for a lot of the late 1880s, 1890s. Then by the turn of the century, though, as my story about World War I tells you, mustaches were going out of favor and there’s a perfect storm.

One of the factors is the new interest in cleanliness. It was now understood that disease was caused by microbes, little bugs and these little microbes, they figured out, actually live in hair and they could use the microscope at this time, they look at hair and oh my god, there’s all these microbes on it. Now hair is scientifically dirty, diseased. So removing hair is tantamount to cleanliness.

That’s one thing. Another thing is that this is the age of body-building. Guys like Eugen Sandow are coming along and introducing this idea of muscle building and body-building. That becomes a new way to display masculinity, youth, toughness and vitality. Eugen Sandow, he realizes right away, if you shave your body, you shave your chest and back and so forth, your musculature comes out more cleanly. So it’s muscles versus hair here, and if you’re going for the muscles, you’re going to try to remove the hair and although Sandow had a short mustache like an aristocratic man of his day, eventually the idea of the clean shaven, smooth, muscular, athletic look is taking over.

The third thing is that we’re entering the age of corporate employment and corporations want their employees to represent the company well and look professional and orderly and disciplined and so we’re having a kind of new regulation society that’s not unlike what I talked about with the courts back in the 17th and 18th centuries where we want discipline as our primary. Discipline and reliability, as well as cleanliness as our primary attributes of a good man, a good employee. Companies started to enforce shaving regulations, even banned not only beards, but mustaches as well.

Even from the police forces. Police have this military tradition of loving to look like military. Even today you’ll see that, right? I mean, police love to have a mustache because it kind of has a military look to it. But a lot of police forces back in the early 20th century were telling their men, “Get rid of those mustaches.”

Brett McKay: We’re still in that today, but you are seeing sort of a resurgence of the beard. What’s the status of the beard today? Does it have any larger cultural significance like it did in times past or is it sort of like any other post-modern idea where the meaning of the beard depends on the person or the group?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Yes, the thing about today is we live in a very culturally fluid time. What I’ve been describing all this time is patterns that are established by elites, dominant political groups and they establish a form for themselves and then sort of impose it as the norm for everyone as much as they can, so we have more of a monolithic style and that’s been true all the way up through till recent times.

I think today we’re seeing a more fluid cultural dynamic where there isn’t one type that is enforced on everyone and there’s some good things about that, I guess, but as a historian or as a sociologist, it’s very difficult to say what’s going on because you have all sorts of people following different drummers. You have quite a tremendous variety of attitudes to facial hair, but I will say that there’s a great deal more acceptance in the last 20 years. Very much more. Even Walt Disney company allows workers at it’s theme parks, since 2012, to grow modest facial hair, which was strictly forbidden up till then.

So that shows you that we are becoming much, much more tolerant of facial hair and because we’re more tolerant, I think we’re going to have it. Because men are always going to want at least the option. When people ask me “Are beards here to stay?” I’d say yeah, I think they are here to stay because we’ve reached a high level of tolerance and I think that beards help men develop style of look for themselves and to establish themselves as men and that too, is increasingly difficult in our society where masculinity’s more and more up for negotiation.

Going back to our theme that we’ve followed in this whole discussion. Because beards are associated with nature, and with natural masculinity, it always is a resource there for men to use to stake at least a basic claim to their nature as men, and I think that’s why it’s going to stay.

Brett McKay: Well, Christopher Oldstone-Moore, this has been a great conversation. We really dug deep, but there’s so much more in your book that people can find out more. Is there any place where people can learn more about the book or your work?

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Well, I think the book is widely available now in paperback, so that’s good news. I’ve done a couple things in the Wall Street Journal, and you can even find an interview of me on CBS Sunday Morning and if you Google around, you’ll find some smaller articles where I make some commentary about our present situation if they want to read.

Brett McKay: Well, fantastic, well Christopher Oldstone-Moore, thank you so much for your time, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Great, thanks, it’s been the same for me.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Christopher Oldstone-Moore. You can check out his book of Beards and Men on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/beards, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out The Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy this show, have gotten something out of it, I’d appreciate if you take a minute to give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher, help us out a lot. As always, thank you for your continued support and until next time, this is Brett McKay, telling you to stay manly.

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

Having a beard is always manly. Having a beard in the winter is not only virile, but dang practical too. It provides a number of benefits (that legal has told me I cannot guarantee) that our clean-shaven brethren sadly miss out on.  

1. If you fall in the ice, a beard can literally save your life.

While it may seem like an urban legend, if you fall through the ice into a lake or stream, your beard may in fact save your life. If you aren’t able to get yourself out of the water within 5-10 minutes, you need to extend the window of time for rescuers to get to you. While drowning will kill you in just minutes, hypothermia takes much longer. Try to get your arms — and even your beard — to freeze to the ice so that if you go unconscious, you’ll remain above water.

2. Protection from wind burn.

Wind burns are not actually from wind. They are in fact simply sunburns that we get in cold weather. It’s most common on the face, since that’s often the only exposed piece of skin during the coldest months. And guess what bearded men have covering, and therefore protecting, their face? One study found that facial hair blocks 90-95% of UV rays, rendering you supreme over the powers of the sun. Not only that, but it’ll guard against skin cancer, too. Grow a beard, prevent cancer.

3. You’ll stay warmer.

A walk in the winter is not often a pleasant affair. You can cover up your extremities pretty well, but to cover the face requires the use of a bulky scarf blocking your mouth and breathing apparatus (nose). In biting temperatures, this fact alone can keep you at home rather than attending a party at a friend’s house, or having a night out on the town.

If you have a beard, that annoyance is no more. The soft mane covering your face is nature’s scarf. In fact, some evolutionary theorists argue that men grow beards while women do not because men were out hunting, and needed to keep warmer than their shelter-dwelling mates and children. Suffer red, winterized cheeks no more and instead grow a cozy, face-cuddling beard.

4. Preserve winter drinks in that luscious mane.

One of the worst parts of having a beard is getting food stuck in it. One of the best parts of having a beard is the ability to preserve your cocktails inside of it. When you drink out of a glass, unless you’re being extra dainty about it, some of the liquid will invariably escape the rim and jump right onto your upper lip. While your mouth may miss those errant droplets in the moment, it’ll be glad to have them preserved for later. For once his drink is gone, the beard-clad fellow need not lament; a smidge of Winter Jack has been left behind. His glass may be empty, but at the time of his choosing, he may extract the spirit from his mustache and once more enjoy the delicious taste of whiskey mixed with apple cider liqueur.

5. Learn the manly art of grooming.

The cold, dark winter months can leave you stuck inside and be a little boring and humdrum. So use the season to learn a new skill — like how to trim and groom your facial hair. While beards and ruggedness go hand in hand, that doesn’t mean your face-coat should be allowed to run wild. By maintaining your mane, you can show up to holiday parties looking like a burly yet refined lumberjack. Use scissors to trim its overall growth, while keeping your neck beard in check and creating clean lines on your upper cheeks with a manly safety razor; they even make ones that are smaller and designed just for detailing. With regular grooming, you can look sharp this winter while still getting all the glorious benefits of the beard.

Be sure to read our article on how to grow a beard!

Illustrations by Ted Slampyak

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

Just as the hair on your head needs some care and attention, so does the hair on your face. Beard oils are a great way to condition your facial hair, moisturize the skin underneath, and reduce the frizz so you stay looking burly yet well-kempt.

But beard oils are expensive, running upwards of $10 for just an ounce or two. Enter homemade beard oils. The start-up costs are a little expensive, largely due to the spendy essential oils they require, but they’ll go a long ways.

While the possibilities for beard oil creations are endless, with the holiday season upon us, why not try out some recipes that evoke the scents of yuletide? Infuse the season’s greetings right into your beard hair! I tested out numerous combinations of oils to find just the right holiday blends.

Since you only use a few drops at a time, those little 1oz bottles of essential oils last forever, and you’ll have a hard time getting through them yourself. Why not turn some of it into gifts and spread the holiday joy by putting bottles of your homemade concoction in all the stockings of your bearded brethren? You can even give them to your clean-shaven pals, as beard oil doubles as a refreshing, moisturizing aftershave.

Before you get started, you should read up on my primer on homemade beard oils. It walks you through carrier oils (the base of your creations) and essential oils. The gist is simple, though: pour 1oz of carrier oil (I used almond oil for all of these because that’s what I had on hand) into a small bottle, drop in your essential oils, shake up the bottle, and you’re set. It’s truly one of the easiest DIY gifts you can wrangle up this holiday season.

Supplies

• 1oz bottles with caps
• carrier oil of choice (again, I used almond this time around)
• essential oils:
  • sandalwood
  • cedarwood
  • vanilla
  • tea tree
  • orange
  • cinnamon cassia
  • peppermint

Winter Cocktail Beard Oil

Putting alcohol into your beard will dry your hair and skin out, so you don’t want to douse your chin sweater with booze directly. Instead, apply this moisturizing beard oil with a scent inspired by wintry, tasty alcoholic concoctions. The orange and vanilla mimic the sweetness of the alcohol, the cinnamon gives it a cider-y edge, and the sandalwood is just a great masculine scent that has a little bit of sweetness to it to give this blend an almost whiskey-like smell.

• 1oz carrier oil of choice
• 2 drops cinnamon cassia
• 10 drops sandalwood
• 3 drops orange
• 2 drops vanilla

Christmas Tree Beard Oil

This scent is earthy, but with a touch of minty freshness as well. This may be my personal favorite.

• 1oz carrier oil of choice
• 7 drops cedarwood
• 7 drops sandalwood
• 3 drops tea tree

Candy Cane Beard Oil

This is sweet smelling, and sweet feeling. Your loved ones will be nuzzling up to your face all the day long, thinking you’ve been rubbing candy canes on your cheeks.

• 1oz carrier oil of choice
• 10 drops peppermint
• 2 drops orange
• 2 drops cinnamon

Deep in the Wood Beard Oil

This bad boy is deeply earthy, with just a hint of sweetness. It’s probably the most polarizing. You’ll either love it or think it smells a little too much like a forest.

• 1oz carrier oil of choice
• 15 drops cedarwood
• 6 drops vanilla

Holiday Cheer Beard Oil

This oil doesn’t necessarily have an overarching theme like the others, but it smells dang pleasant. The aromas combine to create a joyful and festive scent that is sure to win everyone over.

• 1oz carrier oil of choice
• 10 drops sandalwood
• 5 drops tea tree
• 2 drops orange

Use these recipes as jumping off points to create your own holiday-themed beard oil recipes, and dispense them freely to your friends and family alike!

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

Thinking about growing a beard but don’t know how to take care of it once you got one? I visited Hudson Hawk Barber & Shop in Springfield, MO to learn how to trim both a short beard and a longer beard.

Can’t grow a beard, period? I’m afraid I can’t help you there–but I feel your pain! (Though I can grow a mustache, I can’t grow a good beard to save my life.)

If you’re reading this in an email click here to watch the video.

Filmed by Andrew Edwards

Edited by Jordan Crowder

Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

“Hey Fred, your beard is looking a little scraggly. Have you tried rubbing some beard oil in it? It’ll change your life, brother.”

Just like the mop on top of your head needs to be taken care of, so does the mop on the lower half of your face. This involves regular shampooing, trimming, combing…and an oft-forgotten step: oiling. Beard oil offers a variety of benefits for an unshaven man: it moisturizes the often dry skin underneath, it tames beard frazzle, and it just smells nice.

I’m a recent convert to beard oil, and now I won’t turn back. While I’d seen it on plenty of men’s websites and even in retail shops, I hadn’t ever even tried it before finding some at a farmer’s market and testing it out. I was immediately entranced by the smell, and was hooked by the softness of my beard and the health of my skin underneath it. While I loved the product, it was expensive — as most beard oil is. You’re looking at paying between $10-$20 for a 1-2 oz. bottle (you only use a few drops at a time). While that amount will last awhile, I figured there had to be a way to make it on my own a little more cost effectively. And don’t ya know it, there is! Follow the simple steps below, and you’ll be on your way to having a soft beard that shines and doesn’t itch — a miracle I say!

Ingredients

• 1oz bottles
• Mini measuring cup or shot glass
• Small funnel
• Carrier oils (more on that below) — I used jojoba, sweet almond, and coconut oil
• Essential oils — I used tea tree, peppermint, cinnamon cassia, and orange

The carrier oils and essential oils were bought at my local GNC. Be warned, they aren’t cheap ingredients, but they’ll last a really long time. The essential oils were $5-$10 each and the carrier oils were each about $10 (even though the jojoba oil was 4oz and the sweet almond was 16oz — keep that cost difference in mind when making your own recipes). So while startup costs are higher, your per-bottle cost ends up being just $2-$3 using the recipes below. (Keep this in mind when thinking about Christmas presents for your bearded friends and relatives!)

A Primer On Carrier and Essential Oils

Carrier oils will make up the bulk of your beard oil recipes. They’re a base oil that carries the more potent essential oils and dilutes them to make them more palatable for your skin. When not diluted, essential oils can actually cause irritation and burning. There are a variety of carrier oils out there that provide different benefits, and most have just a faint scent (unlike the potent essential oils). My choices for carrier oils — jojoba, sweet almond, and coconut — were chosen mostly on availability, but they’re also the ones that are most common in beard oil recipes.

A few carrier oils and their benefits:

• Jojoba – is similar to your natural human oils and is easily absorbed by your skin
• Argan – makes skin softer and protects against signs of aging like wrinkles
• Sweet almond – keeps inflammation at bay, which particularly helps prevent in-grown hairs
• Coconut – one of the best natural moisturizing and hydrating products on the planet, great for dry environments
• Hazelnut – helps prevent acne and eczema
• Hemp seed – another moisturizing oil, helps prevent facial hair from becoming brittle

Essential oils are natural compounds found in seeds, stems, flowers — and almost every other part of a plant. When you squeeze an orange peel or lemon peel, for instance, the fragrant residue left behind contains essential oil. Essential oils are extremely potent to the nostrils and provide scent and additional health benefits to your beard oil. They have been used for thousands of years for their medicinal and therapeutic benefits, a few of which are listed below:

• Cedarwood – helps prevent acne
• Eucalyptus – aids again skin irritation
• Lemongrass – invigorates, like a good aftershave
• Peppermint – invigorates and refreshes the skin
• Amla – repairs damaged hair

Other essential oils are used primarily for their scent: sandalwood, clove, sage, rosewood, tea tree, lime, bay rum, vanilla, etc. All told, there are around 100 essential oils available to consumers.

How to Make Beard Oil

It’s really quite simple to make your own beard oil with these ingredients. All you do is mix the various oils and you’re good to go. The key is to simply experiment with various combos and find what you like best based on scent and desired skin and hair benefits. Follow the basic steps below, then create your own recipes! I provide a few sample recipes, but the options are limited only by your imagination.

1. Start With Carrier Oils

The first ingredients in your recipe are your carrier oils. Basically, mix and match your oils to get about 1oz’s worth (you can always do more or less as desired; I have 1oz bottles, so that’s how much I made). In this first recipe I measured out half an ounce each of jojoba oil and sweet almond oil. You could also simply use a single carrier oil rather than mixing. Again, it’s about scent and the health benefits accrued, as well as what feels best on your skin. Experiment with various combinations of carrier oils to find what you like best.

Use the funnel to pour the oil into the bottle. Easy peasy.

2. Add Essential Oils

After you’ve added your base carrier oils you’ll add drops of essential oils for scent. Your essential oils will come in a bottle with a built-in dripper; remember that they’re potent, so you don’t want to add more than 10 or so drops to each 1oz mixture. For the more powerful scents, 3-5 drops is all you need. You can mix and match essential oils to find the scent that you like best.

3. Mix and Enjoy

Making your own beard oil is that easy! After you’ve added your essential oils, put the cap on, shake it up, and enjoy. To use, simply put a small dab on your fingers (a few drops is all that’s necessary) and rub into your beard. The best time to use is after a shower when you’ve washed your beard and your skin is fresh.

A Note on Using Coconut Oil

Coconut oil, being an excellent moisturizing agent, is often used in beard oils. The coconut oil that you buy in the store is most often in solid form, as it has a high melting point of about 76 degrees F. This can obviously make it difficult to work with. To use coconut oil as a base carrier of your beard oil, you’ll have to first melt it so you can mix with your essential oils. I put a large tablespoon of the solid oil into a dish, then set that dish into another that had hot water. The oil liquified in no time and I was able to mix in a few drops of an essential oil. It will then re-solidify, and you end up with more of a beard balm. You simply rub a little on your fingers, and your body heat will melt it, thereby turning it into oil again, ready to use on your facial hair.

A Few Recipe Ideas

After some experimenting, you’ll quickly find your favorite combos. My favorite scents are definitely peppermint and tea tree. As for carrier oils, I enjoy the coconut because the dry Colorado air dries out my skin. The jojoba is also a great base since it closely mimics the natural oil your body creates. Again, refer to the benefits above of the various carrier oils, and figure out what works best for you. Below are a few of my favorite recipes. The names are my own creation, but feel free to steal them.

Coco-mint

• 1 tablespoon melted coconut oil
• 3 drops peppermint oil

Sweet Mint

• 1/2oz jojoba oil
• 1/2oz sweet almond oil
• 5 drops peppermint oil
• 2 drops tea tree oil
• 2 drops orange oil

Forest Haven

• 3/4oz jojoba oil
• 1/4oz sweet almond oil
• 5 drops tea tree oil
• 3 drops peppermint oil

Fall Face Foliage

• 1/4oz jojoba oil
• 3/4oz sweet almond oil
• 2 drops cinnamon cassia oil
• 2 drops orange oil
• 2 drops tea tree oil

Have you made your own beard oil? What’s your favorite recipe?  

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!