Maintaining your Stubble
I believe gone are the days when clean shaven was the only way to look well groomed. If you have noticed lately some of the most stylish and sophisticated men on the are adopting a more rugged approach to facial hair, and from haveing drinks at the bar to meetings in the boardroom stubble is no longer seen as scruffy.
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If uncared for, stubble can make you look rough or homeless – but equally it has the ability to transform a smooth baby face into something far more masculine and handsome. The look Im going to cover in this article (and what I consider to fall under the term ‘stubble’) includes everything from a couple of day’s growth to a short beard.
We’ll tackle how to achieve it, who wears it well and how you can perfect what Mother Nature has given you.
How To Maintain Stubble Or A Short Beard
So how do we go about achieving this manly, distinguished look? Sit there and wait for it to grow, right? Unfortunately not. To maintain stubble that enhances your look, it requires a little more work than that. It’s one of those ‘effortless’ things that requires, well… effort.
Is The Stubble Look For Me?
First off, you have to ask yourself whether stubble is for you, because it doesn’t suit everyone. With this in mind, below are some simple indicators to help you decide whether short facial hair is for you.
You should grow some stubble if:
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You react badly to regular shaving.
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You’re fed up of looking baby faced and want to add some masculinity to your look.
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It isn’t suitable (maybe for work) to grow a beard, but you’re looking to be less clean cut.
Avoid growing designer stubble if:
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You can’t! There’s nothing worse than half baked stubble, aka bum fluff.
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You’re not prepared to maintain it.
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Your partner doesn’t like kissing a rough face.
Shaping & Grooming
I mentioned in the introduction that stubble was no longer considered scruffy, but this largely depends on how you maintain it. One of the best ways to keep your stubble in check is by ‘shaping’ your facial hair to give a cleaner, sharper look.
Shaping involves clean shaving the areas outside the natural growth of your stubble – the top of your cheeks and the lower part of your neck – to eradicate any stray hairs and give a relatively clean line to the edge of the stubble. This is particularly important if you have dark, tough stubble that grows from your cheekbone down to the edge of the collar.
That being said, the major trend within men’s facial hair at the moment is a ‘natural’ look, so don’t try to sculpt your beard with too much precision – ‘chinstraps’ are not what we are aiming for here.
My biggest tip for this kind of work is to ensure you use a shave gel or shave oil that doesn’t lather during shaving. This will enable you to see clearly what stubble lies underneath (so you don’t shave off too much) but still provides you with optimum razor glide.
I read this article that gave me some time to pause and think about keeping my stubble and not shave it completely off anymore....
Turns out that Researchers in Australia took pictures of 10 men at four different stages - clean shaven, 5-day light stubble, 10-day heavy stubble and heavy beard - and 351 women and 177 men were asked to rate each face for attractiveness, masculinity, health and parenting ability.
The men with the heavy stubble came out on top while clean shaven men and those with full beards were considered equal in their attractiveness.
Those with light stubble had the lowest scores from both men and women. Researchers suggested that the patchiness of five days was to blame and noted that "a threshold of density and distribution may be necessary for beards to function as an attractive signal."
