Well Maintained Scruff – Five places to keep an eye on.
It was a trend, and then it wasn’t, and now… some stubborn souls (myself included) are refusing to give up their week old beard now that it’s cold out. Keep it looking presentable by paying attention to these five areas:
1. Your Neck line
You can look 100% put together but if you’ve got a week’s worth of growth trickling down towards your Adams apple, it looks terribly lazy. Shaving it smooth can create a super harsh looking line between neck and scruff. Sort of like you started to shave, and then suddenly had to run out the door. Instead, while keeping your face fuzz around 4-8 mm, buzz your neck down to 2 or under. It creates more of a gradual look. Make the switch to a shorter length when your chin goes from horizontal to vertical, and thus, becomes your neck.
2. Your Cheek Line
Your beard naturally thins out once it gets about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way between your jawbone and your eyes, but it’s those dark stray hairs that you need to watch out for. Check every few days by getting up close to the mirror, and slowly turning your head from side to side. If they’re dark and coarse? Get rid of em’. Many of us have lighter feeler type hairs farther up, but it’s the thick beard type hairs you want to eliminate.
3. The top lip
After about a week you’ll start to feel your mustache start to creep over and onto your top lip. It gets irritating fast and it’ll feel like you have food stuck to your face. It seems like it wouldn’t make much of a difference, but keep your stache’ hairs from running over onto your lip. Use your beard trimmer with the guard off, brush or comb those hairs down over your lip, and trim where they cross over from skin to lip. Don’t forget the corners of your mouth. It makes a surprisingly big deal.
4. Overall Evenness
Your facial hair isn’t like a living room rug. All of the hairs won’t end up being the same length. A few days after you’ve reached medium scruff length (where the hairs lose much of their stiff bristle) set your beard trimmer at a much longer length than what your beard is probably at. Then click down, slowly, until you find the setting that’s just barely trimming some of the whiskers. Not ALL of the whiskers, just some. You want to take off the tops of the fast growers to even them out. An even trim will make you look much more presentable.
5. Your nostrils
The thing about having scruff is that it’s pretty easy to forget about checking your nostrils for random nose hair escapees. Just because you’re not shaving your face every day doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep up on the other hairs that stick out of your face. While you’re at it, get up close and make sure you don’t have a big thick black hair (or four) growing out from the top of your nose. It happens. Also check that you’re not sportin’ a baby unibrow either. But don’t go shaving between your eyebrows.
Got any other tips for maintaining a scruffy yet respectable face? Leave them in the comments section.
I use this Wahl Trimmer
and love it. Although I do recommend growing out your full beard and testing the lengths before on your neck before going all out. I didn’t realize that they err on the side of shorter.