Beards that are attractive and stylish require some work, and most of it involves the definition of your neckline and the cheek line which are the places where your beard comes to an end. If you’re not going to go for the wild appearance or a full beard to fulfill religious purposes You must ensure that your beard does not grow out and cover the entire neck.
A clearly defined neckline for your beard and neatly groomed cheek lines are usually attractive and sufficient to be appropriate for all work environments and professions. In the event that you have a job in an office, or interact with many people because of your work it is important to draw out the contour of your beard trimming using the benefit of a tool and keep it in good order.
A good starting point is to ensure that it is not higher than adam’s apple. I use my fingers to measure. Place a finger right above your Adam’s apple, this is the place you’ll want to end. Turn your finger towards your cheek, and you’ll also notice your beard’s cheek line.
However, your beard neckline also depends on the shape of your chin. If you have a thick neck or a double chin, the flesh beneath your jaw will tend to be visible from the front. If this is the case, you don’t need to make the beard line too low. Maybe 2 fingers above adam’s apple would work. If the underside of your jaw cannot be seen from the front, you can afford to make your beard line a little lower to pad out your beard a little.
The position of your beard’s cheek line depends on the shape of your jaw. If you are blessed with a strong jawline it’ll be easy to define the shape of your beard cheek line. You can even keep the beard cheek line fairly high because your jawbones will define your face shape. If not, it’s still fine. Just let it creep around your jaw a little to hug your neck. One mistake that many people make is to end the beard right at your jawbone. That makes your beard look wimpy and you may end up looking uptight as well. Unless you’re going for a stubble look, avoid that.
Just a tip. When you are growing out a beard, it’ll tend to look messy. Resist the urge to define your beard neckline and cheek line too high. Allowing it to have some length allows you to observe how hair tends to grow and will help later on when you want to trim the beard down. Your beard tends to even out and ‘tidy’ itself. Sometimes all you need is to stay away from the beard trimmer and give it some length.
Steps to Define your Beard Line on Neck and Cheeks
You can start defining your beard line as early as 2 weeks after you’ve started to let your beard grow out. Some people recommend starting only after a month but you can certainly do so much earlier. It depends on the growth rate of facial hair and the type of beard you want.
When defining your beard line, you can use a beard trimmer although I think a straight razor or normal razor will give you more precision cutting. My preference is a straight razor: it gives me that barber shop feeling and it’s just so much manlier to use it. However, it’s not easy to use if you are not experienced with it so stick to a normal bruan razor with a couple of blades if that works better for you.
Wash your neck and face with warm water and lather on some shaving gel. Try to keep it non-foamy because you want to see where you’re shaving. It’s recommended to shave in the direction of your hair growth, which means you should place the shaver right above your adam’s apple and move downwards to mark out the line.
Some friends prefer to invert the Braun shaver and move it upwards towards your chin. Some used another shaver like Norelco. This is a little riskier in my opinion, especially if you’re trying to do this while tilting your head up and looking at the mirror because your beard line isn’t already marked out in your mind. So always used prefer shaver to minimize the risk. When you’re shaving downwards, you already decided on the beard neckline and you’re just shaving according to it. I like keeping my thumb placed right above my adam’s angle as a stopper of some sort, and that works for it.
This method doesn’t require you to look at a mirror and I generally do not look at a mirror until I’m done but you can do this by standing on a platform and tilting your head slightly. This reduces the need to tilt your head back too much and can help in the beard line-defining process.
I hope this helps you guys to define your beard line!