How to Marry Your Beard with Your Style
A well-groomed beard can make all the difference to your look. Whether you’re a hirsute hipster or you sport some stylish stubble, you can match your beard and style to create an overall effortless look.
Let’s say you’ve been growing out your facial fur for a long time and now it’s time to style it in a way that harmonises your look rather than standing out for all the wrong reasons. Start by thinking about how you would categorise your overall style – are you preppy with skinny jeans and a stylish shirt and pullover? Or maybe you like a rocker look with a tee and sneakers? Or, perhaps you spend eight hours a day in a suit and you need to go from office life to nightlife without having to change your whole look?
Let’s dive in to a few key styles and how to embrace them.
The Chilled-Out Preppy
Ideal Beard Look: Designer Stubble
Standard Style: skinny jeans, shirt, sweater or blazer, and brogues
The bearded man always starts with stubble. Many guys choose to keep things simple by maintaining the stubbled look, which is crowd-friendly enough for the boardroom but stylish enough for the bar too.
Stubble is always on-trend and goes well with pretty much all hairstyles and clothing styles. The unshaven look can harden up a soft chin so if you want to age up a baby-face, this is a great way to do it.
It might look like you’ve just left it to grow, but stubble styles actually take a bit more maintenance than you might’ve thought. New facial hair growth can irritate the skin so it’s important to keep your face moisturised.
The Rockstar
Ideal Beard Look: Garibaldi Beard
Standard Style: Metallica t-shirt, ripped black jeans, denim shirt and distressed biker boots
The rockers among us were pretty happy when beards came back into fashion. If you’re a fan of band tees and ripped jeans, you can embrace your adversity to trimming your beard because it totally matches your look anyway. A long, full Garibaldi beard teamed with a plain white tee, black ripped jeans and distressed sneakers or boots is on-trend even if you don’t want to be!
Maintaining the look means taking a bit of time to make sure your beard is sleek and smooth with a beard balm and flyaways are kept at bay with a good quality beard oil. You could also look into how to trim a long beard, so it continues to grow in the right direction.
The main tip is to just keep things natural. You don’t need to go overboard with styling because the length is already a factor in your look. All you need to do is keep it neat so you don’t go full Viking.
The Hipster
Ideal Beard Look: Full Beard
Standard Style: Retro jacket, roll-neck sweater, tapered trousers and chukka boots
Hipsters get a bit of a bad rep, but let’s face it, if you are one then you’ve been at the forefront of fashion for a while. Love your fade and enjoy your skinny jeans, because we bet you look awesome.
The full beard is like a Garibaldi but without the extended length. It’s usually worn nice and thick round the cheeks and chin but with well-trimmed neckline adding some definition. If you work in an office environment and you have to wear a suit, no problem! If you’ve got a date straight from work, also no problem! The look works tenfold.
We recommend keeping a simple, short hairstyle to keep the look sleek and tidy. Just use a beard trimmer every four or five days to maintain the neckline and get rid of any stray hairs.
The Fashionista
Ideal Beard Look: Short Beard
Standard Style: check the catwalk!
If your style changes like the wind and you love to embrace the latest and greatest from the fashion world, but you want to keep your facial hair no matter what clothes you choose, the short beard is the best choice.
Shorter than the full beard but a little heavier than stubble, the short beard is perfect for guys who want to enjoy a classic beard style. It’s rugged and masculine with one outfit, but smart and easily softened with another, making it the most versatile on our list.
Start with a clean-shaven face and allow around two weeks of growth for the short beard, then just maintain it with a trimmer and some good quality beard care products. Should you shampoo your beard at this length? Yes! Even though it might seem unnecessary to do so without the length, a good beard shampoo and conditioner contains ingredients that love your beard and the skin beneath, leaving you with less chance of itchy skin.
A Beard for Every Style
They say clothes make the man. Well, we don’t necessarily think that’s true. You make your own man, but your style goes a long way to communicating who you are with the world around you. Styling your beard with your look can be easier than you think – get some manspiration online and start springtime with facial hair you love.