Can You Shave on Sundays, at Easter and at Christmas?

Does the church forbid shaving on Sundays and holidays?

The church has no rule against shaving or cutting hair on a Sunday, at Easter or at Christmas. The ban comes from folk custom, and priests who are asked about it usually call it superstition. Father Oleksii Filiuk, a priest of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, told the outlet Glavred in May 2025 that hygiene is not a sin and you may wash on any day, but that haircuts and nail clipping are better done during the week so that Sunday stays undisturbed. That is advice, not canon law. The church's own old rule about Sunday concerns labour: canon 29 of the fourth-century Council of Laodicea tells Christians to honour the Lord's day and, if possible, do no work, and it says nothing of beards or razors. Sunday is the day of the Resurrection, and what priests ask is that you give it to worship. Other Orthodox priests answering readers say the same: a feast day does not conflict with a haircut or a shave, and the natural thing for a Christian on that day is to be in church for the liturgy. So the real question is how you spend the morning. If a shave eats the hour you meant to give to the service, move it to the evening before. If you shave daily, nothing is broken. The church's 'not forbidden' and the folk 'not done' run on separate tracks, and the second still makes grandmothers, mothers and wives take offence at a Sunday razor. Below is where those rules came from and what they banned on each day.

Sunday, Monday and Good Friday in the folk calendar

The folk rules grew from the idea that every day has a character. In Ukrainian tradition Sunday was a day without work: chopping wood, sewing, washing laundry, bathing, sleeping late and even combing your hair counted as sins. Haircuts and shaving joined that list by analogy, and the saying that a Sunday haircut takes your wits away lives mostly in popular articles. Monday in that calendar was a beginning: in Podillia people started no new task and called a new shirt on Monday the greatest sin. Accounts of Monday say nothing about shaving, so the 'heavy Monday' is about new undertakings, not the razor. Good Friday is stricter. For the church it is the saddest day of the year, with no liturgy and a strict fast. Descriptions of customs that draw on Oleksa Voropai say nobody sewed, spun or chopped wood with an axe that day. Scissors reach the list only in modern retellings, which say raising them to your head cuts away your health. The old accounts give no separate rule on shaving that day, so it is left to conscience and to the mood of the day. Maundy Thursday works the other way: children were given haircuts then so that their heads would not ache. The folk calendar contradicts itself, and every region chose its own rules. In Galicia, for instance, nobody cooked on Sunday: people ate pies baked on Saturday. The rule asked about work done on the day itself, and whatever could be done beforehand was done the day before.

Shave the day before and keep the holiday for church and table

Beards are a separate case, because religion really did step in there. Leviticus tells men not to spoil the edges of the beard (19:27), and in the Orthodox world wearing one was the custom until Peter I. His decree of 1705 taxed men who refused to shave and exempted priests and deacons. The Old Believers held shaving to be a sin, yet there is no canon requiring a beard of laymen, and theologians who go through the old rules say so plainly. The calendar had nothing to do with it; the quarrel was about beards in general. In practice people do the simple thing and shave or cut the day before the feast. If the feast falls on a Sunday, Saturday is the easy window: nobody is rushing, and the morning is left for getting dressed. Where the household keeps the old customs, agree on it in advance so that the razor does not start an argument at the festive table. In the chair barbers often notice that the line above the ears and across the neck is sharpest on the day of the cut and settles softer by the next morning, so the day before looks most natural. At 044 Barbershop in Kyiv you can book a beard trim or a hot-towel shave, so cheeks and beard are in order by the feast. Come to us the day before for a hot-towel shave or a haircut: a barber sees your neck and nape from behind, and on Sunday all you have left to do is get dressed.