Beard Care in Summer: 7 Rules to Live By

Looking after a beard in summer comes down to seven habits: wash it more often, rinse it after every swim, brush it through daily, swap heavy balm for a light oil, put sun cream on the edges, keep the lines trimmed, and do not shave the whole thing off in the first heatwave. That is the entire list. Summer beard care is mostly a fight with sweat and sun, and you can win it in a few minutes a day.

What summer actually does to a beard

A beard collects things. In July it collects sweat, suncream, dust off the pavement and whatever is drifting around under a plane tree. Sweat is the main one. It dries into salt, salt stiffens the hair, and the skin underneath dries out with it, which is where the itch comes from.

The sun works on it too. UV dries the outer layer of the hair, so a dark beard goes rusty at the tips and a fair one goes brittle. The skin under a dense beard is reasonably shaded, but the edges are not, and an afternoon on the towpath at Little Venice will catch a cheek line before you notice it happening.

Add the fact that hair grows a little faster in warm weather and you get the standard August beard: frizzy at the ends, soft at the edges, itchy underneath. Every one of those has a fix.

Summer beard care starts at the sink

Rule 1: wash it properly, more often. Rinse it daily in the shower, and wash it two or three times a week with a beard wash or a mild shampoo. Not shower gel, and not the bar of soap. Both strip the hair and leave the skin under it tight and flaky. If your beard feels like straw after washing, the wash is too harsh, not the beard too old.

Rule 2: rinse after every swim. Chlorine and salt water both dry the hair out, and a beard sits close enough to your nose that you will smell a chlorinated one all afternoon. Wet it with fresh water before you get in so it absorbs less, then rinse it again after. It is the same advice we give for the hair on your head in the sun damage guide.

Rule 3: brush it through once a day. Thirty seconds with a beard brush or a wide-toothed comb moves the natural oil along the hair, pulls out the day's debris and trains the growth to lie flat. It is the cheapest thing on this list and the one most men skip.

Oil, sun cream, and what to leave on the shelf

Rule 4: go lighter on product. Thick beard butters and heavy balms are winter kit. In the heat they half melt, slide onto your skin and sit there. A light beard oil does the same job without the grease: a few drops rubbed between your palms and worked into a damp beard, right down to the skin, once a day. If your beard is long enough to need hold, a small amount of balm at the ends only.

Rule 5: sun cream where the beard is not. The lip, the cheek lines, the strip of jaw a short beard does not cover. That is where the burn lands, and a burnt lip under a moustache is a miserable week. Ordinary factor 30 or higher, worked in around the edges. A beard is not sunblock, it is shade, and patchy shade at that.

Rule 6: keep the lines trimmed

Necklines and cheek lines drift faster in summer. The hair grows quicker, and sweat softens a line that looked sharp on Monday into a smudge by Friday. The length can wait a while. The edges cannot.

Every two to three weeks is about right. A beard trim here is £11 and takes 15 minutes: shaped, evened out, and the lines put back with a razor. Add it to a haircut when you book and it costs £2 less. Between visits, resist the urge to redraw the neckline yourself in the bathroom mirror. The line most men shave at home sits too high, and a high neckline turns a full beard into a chinstrap.

If you only remember one thing from this post: the neckline lives about two fingers above the Adam's apple. Lower than you think, not higher.

Rule 7: do not shave it off in a heatwave

Every hot spell a man sits down in the chair and asks us to take off a beard he has spent two years growing, because he is boiling. Fair enough. But shaving it rarely cools you down as much as you hope, and the men who do it in July are usually back in September, growing it again through the itchy stage.

Take it down instead. Dropping a long beard to a short one, or a short one down a grade, loses most of the warmth and none of the face. It also cuts off the sun-dried ends, which is where the frizz lives.

If you have thought about it for longer than one hot afternoon and you genuinely want it gone, we will do it properly. A clean shave is £11 with a straight edge and hot towels, and your face will not have felt like that in years.

Either way, come in before you attack it yourself. Ask for the weight taken out and the lines put back, tell us how you wear it - work, weekends, motorbike helmet, whatever - and we will trim it to survive the season. After thirty years on Harrow Road we have seen every August beard there is. Walk in, or book a chair and the slot is yours, no waiting.