Many men often wonder how to get facial hair to grow, and it’s no secret why. Facial hair growth gives men’s faces more variability and more masculinity than they’d have otherwise, and growing more facial hair is the surest course toward a roguelike stubble or a masterful beard.
But how should you stimulate beard growth? In this article, we’ll go over tips for growing a beard, starting with skincare fundamentals and then walking you through the other critical elements to increase facial hair growth.
We’ll also show you a few different ways to grow a beard, and advise you on how to grow facial hair faster by removing factors which might be slowing your hair growth down.
Before you learn how to grow facial hair faster, you need to recognize that beard growing begins long before you resolve to stop being cleanly shaven. Your skincare routine affects your hair’s impetus to start growing a beard.
If you don’t know how to keep your skin in good condition, you’ll need to start some good habits before you can truly learn how to make your facial hair grow faster.
Using an exfoliating scrub is essential to promote facial hair growth for one obvious reason and one not so obvious reason. By exfoliating your face with a mildly abrasive sponge and scrub, you’ll help to avoid ingrown hairs, which leave gross patchiness in your facial hair.
When you use an exfoliating scrub, you’ll also dislodge any deep grime that got inside of your hair root capsules just beneath your skin. This grime stresses your hair roots, which prevents them from growing as quickly and as lushly as they would if they were clean.
We’ll come back to this theme of stressed hair roots over and over because it’s core to understanding how to make your beard grow. Importantly, this trick doesn’t just make you grow facial hair faster—you can use it with any patch of hair that isn’t on the top of your head, too.
Making your beard grow fast isn’t necessarily about gaming your hair roots to produce more hair 100% of the time. Sometimes, you’ll get better luck making the appearance of your beard grow fast by applying a supple moisturizer to your face than you will with any other method.
If your beard hairs are especially dehydrated, you’ll notice that applying a moisturizer looks like it’s making your beard hair grow in real time.
Moisturizing your face ensures that your hair roots and beard hairs are heavy with liquid, which makes them appear bigger. Your hair will also be healthier with regular moisturization. Many people wait until after their shower to moisturize their face, but you should probably moisturize it at least once per day even if you don’t shower.
After every shower, be sure to layer on a bit extra moisturizer, as it’ll sink deeper into your facial fascia and moisturize your hair roots for longer.
You probably already suspect that diet is an essential factor when you’re wondering how to grow facial hair faster. But which dietary elements are the most important, and which might you not be getting enough of and thus slowing your beard growth?
There are quite a few different opinions on which vitamins are implicated in beard growth. Many sources cite the B vitamins as critical for hair growth, and there’s some science supporting that idea. It’s true that if you’re deficient in one of these vitamins, your hair growth will suffer, but you’re probably not deficient in any of them if you have a standard Western diet.
As long as you aren’t deficient, vitamins won’t be much help when it comes to how to grow facial hair faster. If you’re interested in ruling out a vitamin deficiency as a hamper on your beard growth, just ask your doctor to run a blood test.
Minerals like zinc and magnesium are also implicated in facial hair growth, but you’re much more likely to be deficient in them than you are with the vitamins. Your body can’t easily store zinc or magnesium, and you probably don’t have enough of either in your diet unless you eat a ton of leafy greens.
You can choose to take supplements for zinc and magnesium if you want, but they have side effects like hunger and diarrhea if you take too many. The best beard growing tips here is to eat a lot of leafy greens and shellfish—your body will internalize the minerals better from these sources than from supplements, too.
Protein is an essential part of your hair, and your hair roots need protein to keep producing new filaments. If you have a choice of proteins, salmon is excellent because it also provides you with fats, which your hair needs to maintain its moisture.
Your hair needs fats to maintain its internal moisture and oils. Fats encase your hair and give it a luster which you’ll be able to notice once your beard is underway.
You probably aren’t deficient in the necessary fats for beard growth, but if you’re wondering how to grow a beard faster and thicker, sometimes an omega-3 fatty acid supplement can do the trick.
Carbs aren’t the most important element of your diet when it comes to growing facial hair, and you probably don’t need to worry about being deficient in carbs unless you’re on the brink of starvation.
Your diet is part of your lifestyle, and your lifestyle is the single biggest set of factors that influence your facial hair growth.
Figuring out how to grow a beard faster is thus a process of figuring out which aspects of your lifestyle can improve.
Exercise is good for your entire body and reduces the amount of stress that your cells endure in addition to making them more adept at coping with stress. Less stressed hair roots are hair roots that are ready for making hair.
Lack of sleep leads to the opposite of frequent exercise—increased cellular stress, and reduced ability for cellular self-repair. Getting rest ensures that you’re eliminating one more source of stress which prevents your hair roots from achieving their maximum output.
As we’ve been harping on, stress is extremely detrimental to your hair roots’ ability to produce hair filaments quickly and effectively. Psychological stress manifests itself elsewhere in your body, causing your heart to beat faster and produce more stress hormones, which percolate to all of your body’s tissues.
Once your hair roots get wind of a stress hormone, they’ll refrain from producing hair at their maximum capacity.
Smoking is broadly detrimental to your health and is specifically linked to reduced hair growth. Cut out the unhealthy habit, and you’ll be on your way to a beard.
Now that you know how to grow more facial hair by changing your diet and lifestyle, you only have a few more barriers before a full beard. You know what we’re talking about: the awkwardly short yet slightly too long beard length stage which comes after a few weeks of growth.
Thankfully, we have a few tricks up our sleeve which will help you cope with the awkward stage of beard growth.
Much like moisturizing your face as we discussed earlier, conditioning your beard can help with making the awkward stage of beard growth a bit more tolerable. Conditioning your beard locks in moisture provides a nice sheen and helps keep your hair roots strong. It also helps ease scratchiness, which can be annoying when trying to sleep.
Diet is a great way to give your body what it needs to grow your beard, but sometimes you need a bit extra. Beard oil penetrates through your hair filaments into the hair root to provide nutrients directly to the hairs, enabling your hair root to produce more filaments at maximum speed.
Beard oil can give your hair even more volume than moisturization or conditioning alone, and give you the edge you need to power through the awkward stage.
Many men find that once they’re an expert on how to grow a full beard, they still might struggle with the scratchiness that a nearly full beard can bring. Beard oil can help to soften your beard hairs and reduce itching, too.
More importantly than any other tip, hang in there. The awkward stage of beard growth will soon pass if you’ve implemented our methods, and your hair will continue to fill out in the way you want.
Don’t give up if the going seems slow while you’re implementing these methods. Your hair persists in your body for weeks at a time before sloughing off, so it can take some time for the newest and healthiest of your beard hairs to be long enough for their progress to show.
