Why Is My Beard a Different Colour?

Your beard is a different colour from your hair because every follicle makes its own pigment, and the follicles on your face do not make the same mix as the ones on your head. Two pigments are involved, one brown-black and one red-yellow, and a small change in the balance turns a brown head into a ginger or blond beard. It is normal, it is mostly genetic, and on its own it says nothing about your health.

Why is my beard a different colour from my hair?

Hair colour comes from melanin, and there are two kinds. Eumelanin gives brown and black. Pheomelanin gives red and yellow. Every head of hair, and every beard, is some blend of the two.

The gene with the biggest say over that blend is called MC1R. You get one copy from each parent. Two copies of a red hair variant usually means red hair everywhere. One copy is where it gets interesting: a study of red-haired families by researchers at Southampton and Newcastle found evidence that a single copy can show in beard colour even when the hair on the head is not red. The usual explanation is that the gene is not equally active in every follicle, so the beard follicles lean red and the scalp ones do not. That last part is the experts' best reading rather than something anyone has measured hair by hair, and other genes are involved too.

Beard hair is also a different kind of hair. It only arrives at puberty, it is driven by male hormones, and it is coarser than what grows on your head. It would be odder if it matched perfectly.

It is rarely one colour, even in the beard

Lift a beard with a comb, root first, under a strong light, and a lot of them turn out to be several colours at once. Darker on the cheeks, redder at the chin, a lighter moustache, a few blond hairs under the jaw. Seen from across the room it blends into one shade, which is why plenty of men only notice the mix the first time they grow it out.

Two things change the shade from week to week without anything happening to the pigment:

• Sun. The ends of a beard are the oldest part of it and have had months of daylight. Hold a long beard out by the tips and compare them with the roots. After a summer outdoors the ends can be a whole shade lighter.
• Length. A short beard lets skin show through, so it reads lighter and softer than the hair really is. Grow it to an inch and the true colour turns up, including the ginger you did not know was there.

That second one explains a question we hear in the chair: a man grows his beard past stubble for the first time and asks why it has gone red. It has not gone anything. It was red at a grade 1 as well, there just was not enough of it to see.

Making a two-tone beard look meant

The pigment is fixed. How loudly it shows is not, and that is where a cut helps.

Short makes the contrast quieter. At a grade 2 or 3 the colour mixes with the skin underneath and a ginger beard under dark hair stops looking like it belongs to someone else. If the mismatch bothers you, this is the cheapest fix there is.

Long makes it a feature. Past an inch, a red or blond beard under brown hair stops looking like an accident and starts looking like the point. Plenty of men grow it out on purpose for exactly that. The shape matters more than usual here, because a bright beard draws the eye, and our guide to beard shapes covers which ones hold up at length.

The sideburn is where the two colours meet, so blend it. On most mismatched beards the most obvious spot is not the chin. It is the sideburn, where brown hair stops and red starts on a straight line. Fade the sideburn down a guard or two so the switch happens over a short gradient instead of at a hard edge, and the eye stops catching on it. This is the single change we would suggest to anyone whose beard and hair argue with each other.

Get the ends off after summer. Taking off the sun-bleached tips usually brings the beard back a shade darker and closer to your hair. It is the reason a beard can look a different colour after a trim than it did walking in.

A Beard Trim at the shop is £11 and takes a 15 minute slot. If you are in for a haircut anyway, adding the beard to the booking costs £9 more, which is the easiest way to get the sideburns blended into both at once.

When the colour is changing, not just different

Grey is the exception to everything above, because it is pigment running out rather than a different mix. Beard and scalp do not run out on the same timetable, and a beard usually greys a patch at a time. We wrote about going grey early separately, including what cutting does for a beard that has started to go.

If your beard changes colour suddenly, loses colour in round patches, or the patches come with bald spots or sore skin, that is one for a GP, not a barber.

If you want to dye it

We do not colour at Golden Scissors, so we cannot match it for you. If you try a beard dye at home, do the skin test on the box first, every time. Facial skin under a short beard takes the dye too, and a dark beard dye on fair skin can leave a shadow along the jaw for a few days. A shade lighter than you think you want looks more natural than an exact match.

Before you buy anything, try length first. A shorter beard and a blended sideburn cost less than a box of dye, and they grow out without a line. Book a beard trim and tell the barber the colour is the thing you want fixed, so the cut can be planned around it.