How To Grow A Beard

First off, congratulations on your decision to grow a beard. Remember: you're not jumping on the hipster bandwagon, you're about to begin the cultivation and care of a facial hair style with literally hundreds of thousands of years of hominid history.

A lot of guys ask me about my beard. Or congratulate my girlfriend on it. Or ask to touch it. Therefore I have decided to endeavor to create a brief yet concise how-to guide of my own.

A side note, and this should be obvious: never pull on a man's beard. Doing so is likely to get you run through with a cane-sword, cleaved in twain by a scimitar, or even gut-shot with what I would consider a rather un-gentlemanly retracting wrist-mounted Derringer.

Now there are a number of how-tos about beards on the Internet. But take a look at what I'm rolling with:

ME

Who are you going to trust?

This guy?

I didn't think so. Now if you're quite finished with your bare-faced boyhood bounding about, we shall proceed.


Rules:

• Stick with it!

There is an itchy face phase you're going to have to make it through. 9 out of 10 guys who tell me they have failed to cultivate a real man's beard do so because they can't make it through the itchy phase. It will take 2 - 5 weeks or even longer in some cases. Courage! Perseverance! Stop being such a feckless little shit!

• Moisturize and exfoliate!

Seems obvious in the post-Queer Eye era but you'd be surprised. I use plain Aveeno Daily Moisturizer for everything, including shaving. It works for me and it keeps my life simple. You may try fancy beard oils, or plain almond oil (which is what most of those products seem to have as a base) but oil doesn't work for me. You know what else doesn't work for me? Old-Timey letter-pressed labels designed to make me feel like the man I aspire to be. I will be that man when I take that plain-old health food store bottle of almond oil into the kitchen and eat it when I find I can't use it in the bathroom. Anyway, if you really want a specialty product with retro typefaces on the label I'm told this stuff is pretty damn good.

I use clean white washcloths to exfoliate. You may use a "scrub" of some sort. This will not make you less manly than me. I think St. Ive's Apricot Scrub is a great product to have on hand. It is affordable and available most places. That said-

This dude never touched the stuff.

Last rule:

• No neckbeards! 

NO. It wasn't even cool then.

WRONG. On so many levels.

OK. Possible exception: you want to go 100% neckbeard, in which case I applaud your commitment to irony and / or insanity. Please send pics, I will post them here. This brings us to:


Set-up and Maintenance:


To get started all you need is the will to begin and your regular shaving tools. You will only shave your neckbeard zone and possibly your upper cheek area as I must do to avoid approaching Mexican Wolf Boy territory. 

Henceforth these lines of delineation shall be known as your "neckline" and "cheekline", respectively. 

Here's how to find the neckline, where your beard ends and your neckbeard begins. People find this difficult. It is not. 

1.) Looking straight ahead from a relaxed position tilt your head down 10 - 15 degrees. 
Where your submandibular area meets your neck: that's your natural neckline. 

Truth bomb: If you cannot find this line due to amorphous body shape or general lack of ability to follow directions I'm going to suggest that a full beard is not for you. I apologize for wasting your time. Good luck.

2.) Very gradually shave your neckbeard working toward the neckline. 
Do not try to define that line then shave the rest. You will fail. 
Shave little by little, check your progress by tilting your head up and down slightly, then repeat. 

Easy. Just takes some patience at the outset. Once these lines are locked in by some solid beard growth you'll rarely, if ever, have to think about it again.

Some will speak of natural vs defined neck and cheeklines. I feel strongly that natural is the only way to go. It will take a few tries as your beard grows in. It is frankly more difficult to discover and achieve the natural neckline and cheekline but the reward is not looking like my third grade orchestra teacher.

Exception to this suggestion: Rick Ross.

Not my 3rd grade orchestra teacher, but damn I wish he had been.

There're excellent guides for locating each area on pre-Euclidean internet hypertext webpage beards.org. Here are links to their cheekline and neckline pages. This is a great resource for in-depth articles and community support. For the latter I also recommend r/beards on Reddit. That said, I'm cheat-sheeting this motherfather for you so stick with me a little longer, dammit. Next up:


Tools: 

• Clippers. Nice ones. With attachments

I recommend a semi-pro set in the $100 range from Andis, but I shave my head too so it's well worth it to me. If this is a beard-only purchase a Wahl set from the drug store for half that price should serve you just fine. You may go the "beard trimmer" route but I do not recommend it. If it looks more like a vibrator than a tool then most likely the only tool in front of your mirror will be you. Why? A number of reasons: These often break. My beard hair literally broke one once. This would be a cute anecdote to invent but it is the truth. I gain very little by telling you this and I will never get that $30 back. Finally, in regards to a real set of clippers, you may need the longer attachments one day. That is assuming you're not going to half-ass this thing like everything else you try to do. ARE YOU? No. Next:

• Scissors, small and sharp, for mustache trimming
• A comb

That's it for set up and tools. You're ready to grow. And that brings us back around to the first rule: stick with it! You've created a solid foundation for a real man's beard, stay the course. Consider the time and money you are saving by not shaving. Consider you are not just becoming a bearded man, you are becoming a better man.

There is much you can do as you journey forth to improve your chances for successful bearding:

• Become a crab fisherman or a pirate. Hell, any non-military non-cruise ship job on a boat will do
• Speaking of hell, join the Hell's Angels
• Become a bird-call magnate, ice-road trucker, recloose survivalist, hermitted taxidermist, ascetic guru, or extremely dedicated mushroom farmer
• Move to Brooklyn, NY you will blend right in
• Take more risks, both in life and love
• Be a more compassionate human being
• Adopt a pack of wolves, a group of other exotic predators, or even just a couple dogs and cats from your local shelter and become their pack leader
• Travel to a third world nation, ostensibly as a journalist, but become a freedom fighter and fall in love with the daughter of your enemy's leader
• Write a semi-fictionalized novel-length account of the above and self-publish it
• Self-print and self-bind the above mentioned book with homemade paper and glue
• Become the world's most dangerous game: MAN and be hunted by a bunch of rich dudes on a private island and defeat them all using only your wits, will, grit, and sheer determination
• Give everything you own to the less fortunate and travel around healing the infirmed with only your touch, or just doing small favors for them. They can use all the help they can get!
• Speak less, listen more
• Stick to it 
• Exfoliate 
• Moisturize
• NO NECKBEARDS

These are just suggestions, of course. I'm sure you will come up with many more adventurous and humanitarian options. I'd love to hear all of them. In any event, you're off to a great start! I believe in you! If it helps, print the photo of me at the top of this post and keep it your wallet for inspiration. That would not be weird at all.

If you do end up shaving off your beard, this method is acceptable.

If you don't make it, that's OK too. Every day, or at least every time you shave, is a new chance to put these principals into action: Stick-to-itiveness, thrift and expedience, a love of adventure, and goodwill towards all humankind. Even sans-beard you can get all that happening for yourself (with the obvious exception of thrift and expedience, sorry).

To the better man! The bearded man!

EXCELSIOR!