How to Grow a Beard: The First Eight Weeks

How to grow a beard, in one answer: stop shaving, keep the flat of your throat clean, and leave everything else alone for four weeks. Beards do not usually fail because the hair is not there. They fail in week two or week three, when a man gets impatient, tidies a cheek, takes a bit off the other side to match, and shaves the lot off by Sunday. The growing part is waiting. The shaping part is ours.

Week by week, what is actually happening

Days one to seven. Even stubble, no decisions. It looks deliberate because at this length everything does. Nothing to do.

Week two. The itch. Every hair the razor took has a blunt, sharp end on it, and somewhere around day eight to fourteen those ends are long enough to bend and press back into the skin as they grow. That is the whole explanation. It is not dryness, it is not an allergy, and it passes by itself once the hair gets past that length. Wash it with warm water and a bit of shampoo, dry it properly, put a moisturiser on the skin underneath if it is sore. Do not scratch it with your nails at your desk, which is how most men end up with a rash they blame on the beard.

Week three. The ugly one. There is enough length to look untidy and not enough to hold any shape, the growth on your cheeks is obviously thinner than the growth on your chin, and the moustache has not joined up with anything yet. Almost every beard that gets abandoned gets abandoned this week. If you can get through it without picking up a trimmer you have done the hard part.

Week four. It turns. The hairs lie in a direction instead of standing up, the density starts to read as a beard rather than as neglect, and for the first time there is a shape to work with. This is when we want to see you.

Weeks five to eight. Length and weight settle. Anywhere genuinely sparse will now stay sparse, but the hair around it is long enough to lie across and cover it, which is why a beard often looks fuller at week eight without a single new follicle appearing.

How to grow a beard that comes in patchy

Density and pattern are set by your follicles and nothing on a shelf changes either. What you can change is how long you wait before judging it, and what shape you then ask for.

Give a gap the full eight weeks. Thin cheeks at week three tell you nothing, because the hair that will eventually cover them is only a few millimetres long. By week eight the surrounding growth has usually lain over the worst of it.

If it is still bare at eight weeks, the answer is a different beard, not a longer one. Gaps get more obvious as length increases, not less, because long hair separates and shows the skin between. A shorter beard run all over on one guard reads as uniform and hides a thin patch far better than the same beard at an inch. The other move is to stop fighting the map and work where you are strong: most men who cannot hold full cheeks can hold a chin and a moustache comfortably, and a well-cut goatee or a horseshoe is a real style rather than a consolation.

One thing worth separating out. Never growing much on the cheeks is normal and is a pattern. Hair falling out of a beard you already had, in a defined round patch, is not. Take that to a GP or a dermatologist; it is outside what a barber can read off your face.

The neck is the only thing you touch

The temptation in week two is to clean everything up. Resist it everywhere except the flat of your throat, well below your jaw, and keep a clear margin under the line you imagine your neckline taking.

The reason is that a neckline cut into a two-week beard ends up in the wrong place. You are guessing at a line for a beard that does not exist yet, and every time you redo it you start from your last guess, so it climbs. Where that line actually belongs, and how much cheek to take, is a subject of its own, and our guide to beard shape, length and neckline walks through both. While you are growing, the useful version is short: shave nothing you would have to regrow.

Same goes for the moustache. Take the hairs that are actually in your mouth off the lip line and leave the rest.

Week four: what a barber does to a four-week beard

It takes about fifteen minutes and almost none of it is length. We set the neckline properly, decide with you whether the cheeks get a hard razor line or stay natural, square or round the corners of the jaw depending on how your face sits, even out the top of the beard so it flows out of the sideburn instead of stopping at it, and take the moustache off the lip.

The length itself we mostly leave. A four-week beard has nowhere near enough hair to survive being evened out with a guard, and a man who asks us to make it neat at week four usually means make it look like week eight, which no trim can do. Come back at eight weeks and we will take a proper opinion on the length.

A beard trim is £11 and 15 minutes. Most men put it on the end of a cut instead, which is £24 for a haircut and beard together in 45 minutes, since the beard trim comes off £2 when it goes with any haircut. We shut at 7:30pm Monday to Saturday, so a fifteen-minute beard trim after work is realistic rather than a scramble.

What not to buy while you wait

Beard oil is worth having, for the skin underneath and for the week-two itch. It does not grow hair and nobody honest will tell you it does.

Balm and wax hold a shape. At three weeks there is no shape to hold, so they sit in your bag until week eight.

Anything sold as a growth serum is not something we will ever tell you to buy. If you want something that genuinely acts on hair growth, ask a doctor about it, not a barber and not a website.

A trimmer is the real risk. If you own one and you know yourself, put it in a drawer you have to open on purpose until week four. The guide to trimming your own beard is worth reading before you use it, and it is worth reading after week four rather than during week three.

What to say at four weeks, and at eight

At four weeks: "Shape it up but do not take the length off yet. Set my neckline and leave the cheeks natural." That gets you a beard that looks intentional and still grows into something.

At eight weeks there are two decisions. How short you want it run over the top. And whether to have a razored cheek line, which looks sharp and then wants redoing every couple of weeks for as long as it is there. Show us a photo of what you are after and we will say plainly whether your growth pattern can hold it.

If you are somewhere in week three right now with your hand on the trimmer, book yourself in for the end of week four instead. A date in the diary gets most men through the worst seven days of it.