If you’ve decided to keep your beard short, soon enough you’ll be wondering how to trim it. To look their best, short beards need more maintenance and upkeep than longer beards, so learning how to trim a beard properly is a skill worth mastering.
Keeping things neat and tidy with short beards is important to maintaining their style, so regular trimming is part of the package. This is especially true if you’re rocking the corporate beard or anything with an element of design.
Not sure what beard style to go for? Check out this post
There’s nothing worse than a wishy-washy beard that’s overgrown and looking raggedy. With short beards, there’s less room for error and there’s absolutely no room for laziness.
But if you’re not sure how to trim a beard, especially if it’s short, wonder no longer.
Keep reading for our guide on how to trim your short beard.
Let’s firstly assume that you haven’t shaved for at least a week or two. This is an important step to see how long your beard can grow - and how quickly it does so.
It’s around the 1-2 week mark that most men start to suffer beard itch, and give in to the temptation of shaving their beards off. Don’t let this happen!
TIP - Before reaching for the razor, get yourself some beard oil. Beard oil is designed to reduce any discomfort on the skin caused by early hair growth. Using beard oil will almost certainly guarantee you won’t give in to shaving in the early stages.
Get our proprietary beard oil here.
Once you’ve passed the 2-week mark, and the hair is starting to grow, you have the foundations of a short beard style. For trimming and shaping of your short beard at the beginning, it’s wise to visit the barber for the maiden trim.
A barber will look at things such as your face shape, your hair density, and how the hair is growing out before making the first cut. The barber will work out the best line for your beard, and trim accordingly. After this, it’s a fairly simple process of following the line yourself at home.
Regardless of whether you go for the first trim at a barber or DIY, when it comes to trimming a short beard, always start slow.
You can always go back for seconds and trim more later if you need to, but you can’t easily fix mistakes. Caution is key.
What tools do I need to trim my beard?
For best results when trimming a short beard, get yourself the right tools. We recommend buying an electric beard trimmer to make life easier and get more accurate cuts.
For an even cut of your beard, set the beard trimmer at 5 or 4. It that still looks like too much length, then gradually reduce it down to 3 or 2. As we said before, it’s definitely advisable to set the length longer at the beginning and trim your beard in phases.
Depending on what style of short beard you have, you may want to adjust the setting on the beard trimmer to different lengths for different parts of the face.
For example, you might want a longer length on the jaw and moustache, and a shorter length on the cheeks. After a while you’ll get to know what lengths work on which sections and you can start to experiment.
For more tricky sections such as the corners of your mouth, around the ears and nose, scissors and a comb are the go. Use the comb to raise the hairs from the face, then trim along the line with the scissors. Trim slowly and carefully - again, caution is required.
For trimming the finishing touches such as the neckline and the overall outline of your beard, this can be done in two ways. You can either shave the neckline completely (being careful not to make the rookie mistake of cutting too high), or you can fade it out with trimmers.
WHAT IS THE IDEAL NECKLINE OF MY BEARD?
According to barbers, the ideal neckline of your beard is approximately 2 fingers width above the Adam’s apple. To visualise, the neckline should resemble a U-shape when you look at it from one ear to another.
For fading, set the beard trimmer to 2 around the jawline, and reduce it to 1 when you get to the Adam’s apple.
In summary: the most important takeaway message for trimming a short beard is consistency + caution. Learn to balance your need to keep things neat and tidy with a bit of restraint (don’t go overboard). With the help of the right tools and quality beard oil, your short beard will stay looking awesome.