How to grow and maintain a beard

One of the most common questions I see asked across the internet is how do I grow my beard faster and fuller. Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. To maximize your beard growth potential you’ve got to look inside your body, whereas to maximize the maintenance aspect you need to consider what you do outside your body.

How to maximize beard growth

Beard growth is tied to your health, your genes, and actually your testosterone levels. Unfortunately the same thing that leads to a very thick beard leads to balding of your head hair. But those are all things you can’t control – let’s talk about what you can control.

You have heard this time and time again, but the reasons to take care of your body continue with beard growth. Beards don’t like it when you are over weight, out of shape, and eating a poor diet. For maximum growth you need to take care of your body, slim up, eat right and exercise. In fact weight lifting has shown to increase your body’s testosterone levels – which as I stated below will help your beard growth. Smoking isn’t helping beard growth either.

For me personally, I supplement my diet with a couple different vitamins. In the perfect world vitamins are redundant because you are getting what you need from your diet, however I am not a dietician and I take the easy route out. You can really go batshit crazy with all the vitamins that are available, but I slim it down to three – a multivitamin, fish oil, and biotin. If I had to take it down to two I’d probably drop out the fish oil.

A good multivitamin will cover all your bases and there are a lot of options out there. I go with GNC’s Men’s Sport, however it is a little more expensive than alternative options. With the biotin I take the 5000 mcg version, and two 1000 mg fish oil pills. It’s recommended you take these with food and of course – talk with your doctor before following the advice of some idiot from a beard website on the internet.

How to maintain your beard

So once the hairs have gone from inside your body to outside your body – you gotta do some type of maintenance. The biggest problem I see with men is that they shampoo the beard daily. This will strip out all the natural oils your facial hair needs. This will leave the hair frizzy and prone to split ends and breakage.

I personally shampoo my beard once a week and will condition it a few times a week. The conditioner I use has jojoba oil in it to help soften up the hairs. In fact, if you are finding the hairs are still dry you can add jojoba oil after drying off. Apply it to a damp beard to keep the moisture in. I personally use Tree Ranger beard oil and found it works quite well. Plus it makes you think of hanging out in nature all day.

With a bigger beard you may want to blow dry it to dry it out – if you do that, try to keep the heat on a medium setting and the fan at a low or medium. Blow drying on high heat at high speed is another tool for beard hair destruction. I have two combs that I use – the wide tooth comb is for the beard, and the smaller standard comb is for the mustache. Others recommend using a boar’s hair brush but I have no experience with it, so I don’t know how well it does.

If you want to style your beard or maintain it, you can apply some product. Most hair products out there will help with taming the beard and I use American Crew – Fiber for a more natural look. I will apply it when my beard is still wet and let it dry out. Once dry I will brush it and comb it to make sure it has the natural look. For a handle bar mustache or something more stylized it will be best to go with a Beardbrand mustache wax. Try varying levels of product to get your desired look.