Men's Holiday Grooming Checklist

A men's grooming checklist for a holiday is shorter than most people make it. Haircut three or four days before the flight. Beard taken to a length you can leave alone for a fortnight. The bits you cannot see tidied while somebody else can see them. And nothing on the list attempted for the first time that week. Everything after that is packing. The order matters more than the list does, because out there you have no barber.

Nothing new before you fly

This is the one we say most often between June and September, and it is the one men ignore.

A holiday is the worst week of the year to try a cut you have never had. A first skin fade, a beard off after four years, a 2 all over when you have always been a 4. Any of those can look good. All of them also need a second appointment about ten days later, once you have lived in it and worked out what you actually want moved. That appointment does not exist when you are in Faro.

There is a second reason nobody mentions. You do not yet know how your own head looks in that cut, so every photograph from the trip is a photograph of you finding out.

The week before: the cut and the beard

Timing first, because it is the only part with a real deadline. Three or four days before you fly, not the morning of. A fresh cut sits slightly high and slightly stiff for the first couple of days and settles somewhere around day three.

Which cut is a separate question, and we have answered it properly in the guide to holiday haircuts that hold their shape wet or dry. The one line worth carrying into a checklist: take the taper over the skin fade if you are away longer than a week, because a taper is still tidy at three weeks and a skin fade peaks at about ten days.

The beard is the part men get wrong, and they manage to get it wrong in both directions.

Take it off completely before a fortnight in the sun and you are left with a jaw that has not seen daylight since March, sitting under a face that is about to go brown. That line turns up in every photograph and it takes about two weeks to even out.

Leave it alone entirely, because you are on holiday and it feels like the moment not to bother, and you come home with a beard that has lost its shape and a neckline that has crept a long way down your throat. A beard trim is £11 on its own, or £2 less added to a haircut, so a cut and a beard together bills £24 and holds a chair for forty-five minutes. Fifteen of those minutes keep the edges exactly where they were.

If you are changing the length at all, change it now and live in it for a week first.

What a holiday grooming checklist usually misses

The bits you cannot check in a bathroom mirror, mostly.

The back of your neck. Not the neckline we cut, the softer growth below it that is invisible to you and perfectly visible to whoever is behind you in the queue at the gate. Two weeks unattended and it starts joining up with your shoulders.

Ears and nose. Holiday photographs are mostly taken from below, by somebody sitting down, in hard overhead sun. That is the exact angle that finds both.

Eyebrows, if yours are the sort that need it. Not shaped into anything, just the strays off the bridge.

None of those are on the price list as a thing of their own and none of them take more than a couple of minutes. The only trick is asking at the start of the appointment instead of at the end, because the end is when the cape comes off and the chair is already turning.

The day before, and the morning of

Two things not to do.

Do not have your first proper straight razor shave the day before a flight. A clean shave is £11 with hot towels and it is the closest you will get, which is also why it is the one most likely to leave a bit of heat across the throat if your skin has not met a straight edge before. Have it a fortnight out if you want to learn how your skin takes it. Otherwise take the beard trim and travel with stubble.

If you do shave and it does come up red, alcohol-free balm and nothing else. We went through which balms actually stop razor burn in full, and the short version is that anything which stings on contact is working against you.

And do not book anything for the morning of the flight. Not the cut, not the shave. You will be watching the clock rather than the mirror, and so will we.

What actually goes in the bag

Less than you think, plus one thing that gets taken off you at security.

Razors are the one that catches men out. A disposable or a cartridge razor is fine in hand luggage, because the blade is fixed into a plastic head and cannot be removed. A safety razor with the blade still loaded is not, and neither are loose blades or a straight razor. Those go in the hold or they go in the tray at the scanner. Electric shavers travel either way.

After that, a comb and whatever you already use. A trip is not the time to introduce a new clay to a scalp that is about to sweat for a fortnight, so take the small tub of the thing that is already on your shelf.

Everything else you can buy out there. Usually badly, and at airport prices, but you can buy it.

Do it in the right order

This reads like a list and works like a sequence, because the parts settle at different speeds.

A beard tidy reads the day you have it done, so that one can sit late in the week. Changing the beard's length cannot, because you need a few days of looking at it before you know whether you like it. A haircut wants three days to stop looking like a haircut. Skin wants the longest run-up of the three, because the only way to know how yours takes a close shave is to have had one recently enough to remember.

So it runs backwards from the flight. Skin first, a fortnight out. Hair three or four days before. Beard and the bits you cannot see on the same visit as the hair. Nothing new in the last seven days.

The men who get caught out are nearly always the ones who tried to do all of it on the same Thursday afternoon.

If you would rather it were one appointment than three, book the chair for the Tuesday and put the beard on the same slot.