Which Beard Suits Your Face Shape and Your Growth?
Which beard goes with which face shape?
Pick the beard that gives your face what it lacks: length at the chin for a round face, a softer jaw for a square one, width at the cheeks for an oblong one, and weight low down for a heart or diamond face. An oval face takes almost any style. To find your shape, measure the length of the face and the width across the forehead, cheekbones and jaw, as Braun suggests. Then use the pairings that The Beard Club, Man of Many, Braun and Gillette UK mostly share. Round: a Van Dyke, anchor beard or goatee with tight cheeks. Square: a rounded circle beard, Balbo or Garibaldi. Oblong: stubble, a short boxed beard or mutton chops, with a short chin and fuller sides. Heart: a full beard with short sides, or a goatee. Diamond: a goatee, Balbo or anchor beard with light sideburns, because heavy ones widen the cheekbones further. Two warnings come up again and again: heavy hair on the cheeks rounds a round face further, and a long pointed beard stretches an oblong one. These are styling conventions, not rules, and the guides disagree on details such as how much beard a heart face wants.
Thin cheeks narrow the list to the chin and moustache
Face shape gives you a list, and your growth shortens it. The Beard Club puts it plainly: if the chin and moustache come in thick while the cheeks fill slowly, styles built around the mouth and chin look fuller than a full beard with thin spots. The goatee, Balbo, Van Dyke and circle beard all grow from the chin and upper lip, where hair usually comes in thickest, and short stubble works too, because at that length patches read as shadow rather than gaps. So a round or square face with thin cheeks loses little, since most of its pairings leave the cheeks bare. A heart or diamond face can settle on a goatee or Balbo instead of the full beard. An oblong face has the hardest time, because mutton chops and a short beard with full cheeks need hair exactly where thin cheeks lack it, which makes stubble the safer choice. Cleveland Clinic says genetics decide how thick facial hair is and where it grows, and that most beards keep thickening from 18 to 30, so cheeks that look thin at 22 may still fill in. At 044 Barbershop in Kyiv the beard trim includes modelling, so the outline can be drawn on the hair you have, not the hair in the photo. The Beard Club rates the short boxed beard as only somewhat forgiving of patchiness and the corporate beard as not forgiving at all.
Grow it for a month, then draw the outline on the dense zone
Test a shape before you commit to it. Leave your face alone for three to four weeks, the time The Beard Club lists for most of these styles, then look at the beard in daylight from the front and from the side and note where it is dense. Draw the outline on the densest zone and shave back whatever is thin, never the other way round. Styles with bare cheeks, such as the Van Dyke, need the cheeks and the gaps by the mouth shaved every few days, while a short boxed beard needs a weekly trim, so choose the one whose upkeep you will really keep. Set the neckline one to two fingers above the Adam's apple. If you are under 30, build the shape from the chin and come back to the cheeks later, because Cleveland Clinic says you may be close to 30 before your beard becomes what it is going to be. If the pattern changes, with a new bald patch or one side thinning, Cleveland Clinic advises talking to a doctor. Stubble keeps its look only if you trim it with the same guard every two to three days. Come to us with three or four weeks of growth, and the barber can see from the front and in profile where the beard is dense and set the first line there.