Beard Style for Bald Men That Create Better Facial Balance

A beard can help restore facial balance after you shave your head.You shave your head on Sunday and three days later, your beard and shaved head no longer look balanced.Your beard looks longer and narrower than it did last week. You attempt to shorten it slightly, believing it must be too long, but it actually makes the imbalance worse. Most men think that a shaved head and a beard go together and that any decent beard will do. It will not, because the facial proportions you've relied on for years change once your hair is gone. Before you shaved your head, your hair naturally framed your face. Now your beard has to provide that balance on its own. It's about another whole set of proportion rules that only come into play when the head is bare, and virtually no one will explain the rules before you are standing in front of the mirror saying "Why doesn't a fuller beard automatically look sharp with a shaved head?

When shaved, your face doesn't have its natural frame anymore, and most beards fail to make up for this. Though there is no actual change in your facial bones, the initial sign is usually your face looks longer and thinner than it used to. Guys will see it in photographs more than any other way, because the elongation is not so easy to hide as it is in just one look in the mirror. This is the number one issue that men have in their initial few months of total baldness.

Use Your Beard to Restore Facial Width

Hair at the temples and crown was subtly enhancing the width of the upper portion of your face while complementing the width of your jaw and chin in the lower half. After this is shaved, the outline of your face goes on uninterrupted from the top of your head straight down to your jawline and the eye reads that as being longer and narrower. A beard the same length and shape as your hair won't compensate for the width you lack, since they're not made that way. Do not have shorter stubble as it makes it look like you don't have enough width once bare shaven, and let the beard be between 1 and 1.5 inches long. Don't taper the beard in at the top of the ear on either side, but allow the sides to remain slightly fuller toward the ears.

Cut the sides of the cheeks to the same length, but remember to cut at the width that's just as important as the length of your hairline. This restores the visual width your hair which provides a place for the eye to balance against the empty line of the bare head rather than interpreting it as a single continuous shape.

Choose a Beard Shape That Balances Your Head Shape

If your beard and head shape are similar, the feature you want to soften is doubled up. It may not be your growth pattern, but the shape of your bare head, that makes your beard look rounder or boxier than you'd like. A round head and a full, rounded beard = one continuous curve from the crown down to the beard, and a square or angular head and a heavy, squared beard = the other way around. In either case, the beard isn't balancing the shape of the head, it is repeating it. The outline of a face can be seen by the eye, and for the first time in years, a shaved head unclogs that outline. When the shape of the beard is the same as the head, not the opposite, everything blends together into one, rather than into clearly defined features. This means that even on men who have very good beard growth, the beard looks heavier and not as well defined.

The fix requires knowledge of the shape being fixed. If your head looks round in the mirror, square off the bottom edge of your beard at the chin with a flat line that's roughly an inch wide instead of letting it curl naturally. If the shape of your head appears angular or square, try to round the line of the chin slightly and refrain from creating a hard flat line at the bottom edge, which may follow the corners of your jaw. This is because it is not repeated, but rather contrasted to create the illusion of a structured face. It's the guys who get this wrong, who usually are not growing a bad beard, but they're growing the right beard but the wrong outline for their head.

A Clean Neckline Makes a Shaved Head Look Sharper

One of the quickest ways to make an otherwise well formed beard look bad is to have the growth on the beard line be patchy and uneven, right at the base of the jawline where it meets the bare skin of the neck. It's not about density, it's about the total absence of some sort of stopping point, and then when someone looks at your neck your beard loses its definition. When men shave their heads, they are usually very careful about the line of hair—the line where it is cut—where it ends is not so carefully attended. While the untrimmed beard may look "styled," the eye cannot tell the difference between styled beard and "just didn't shave here" due to the fact that neck hair grows in unpredictable directions and thins unevenly when left untrimmed.

Place your line about 1 inch to 1 ½ inches above your Adam's apple by tilting your head back and locating the natural line where your jaw joins your neck. Rather than shaving to bare skin, which provides a very stark contrast with a completely shaved head, opt for a guard 0.5 millimetres below the line, and following the direction of the hair. A straight line across will not look as natural as the natural curve of your jaw, because it will look more artificial than a natural hairline. This is because it applies the same discipline of edges that you use on your head, so it looks like an intentional beard and not a half finished job.

Close the Sideburn Gap So Your Beard Doesn't Float

The floating beard effect comes from the side burn gap that was never mentioned to you to close. It is almost always a dead giveaway for a beard that doesn't grow out of the face, but rather sits on it, that there is a gap between the top of the ear and where the beard begins. Although the beard is full and well shaped, it is the reason that though the overall appearance is slightly off, most guys can't pin-point what is bothering them. Sideburns were previously part of your head hair that extended from your scalp down to your beard in one solid line. That visual connection is gone when you shave your head and if the beard doesn't reach up to it then you'll have two distinct features, instead of one.

Let the beard grow upward to about the upper 1/3 of your ears, not level with your earlobes.Do not use scissors (but use a trimmer) to cut 0.5 inch from the full density to the skin over about a quarter inch; this will blend in more naturally than cutting abruptly.Don't just peer straight on at the connection, as the gap is most pronounced in profile. This is because it adds back the single solid line that your head hair was creating, making two non-continuous parts back into one complete shape.

Why a Shiny Scalp Makes Your Beard Look Thinner

If this beard appears to be quite full in the mirror in the comfort of your own home, you can be fairly sure it'll look significantly thinner in a meeting or in a photo—and that's not just your imagination. A bald head reflects light, in a way which hair simply cannot, and draws the attention of the observer to a less-than-perfect ring of beard around the face, especially around the cheek line and mustache. In this case the difference between matte and shine is bigger than the thickness of the beard. Light reflecting from a balding area will produce a light reference point right next to your beard. Even a small amount of thinning hair or hair that is not even makes a much bigger difference than it did when you still had hair on top that would buffer the light, which would make it less bright.

Apply a pea-sized amount of matte beard balm to the beard is by using a matte finish beard balm the size of a pea. To reduce the shininess, dust a little of the mattifying powder on the scalp before taking photos or spending long periods of time in bright lights. One should reapply the balm at midday if staying in fluorescent/overhead lighting for more than a few hours in order to account for the difference in contrast in fluorescent versus daylight light.This doesn't make your beard thicker—it simply reduces the contrast that makes thin areas stand out.

Adjust Your Beard Length for a Shaved Head

Length that looks great on a full head of hair can work against a shaved head! If the beard is not changing, but it is proportionate before they began to shave, it can look out of proportion when you shave. Men will normally either cut it short which can make it seem larger, or they will leave it to grow, which can make it seem smaller and the bottom portion of the face look heavy. In the past it was thought that length should be measured against your own hair on the crown, and therefore the length of hair looked balanced according to that. When you remove all the hair, then your brain and everyone else's will adjust for bare skin and the same length that worked before may now feel too short or too long depending on the new proportions.

Reevaluate after 2 weeks as lengths that look good in the bathroom mirror may look different in the office or in daylight. It works because it resets the scale your beard is being judged against; rather than being judged on a length related to your original hair on top, it's judged now on the new proportions of your bare head.

Conclusion

It is not only the beard, it's the six ways your shaved head alters the proportions of the beard in order to answer to them. One of them will fall short of the rest of them and the rest will quietly undercut the overall look, which is often the reason guys think they're doing everything right, but can't get the look they want.

In the end it's like this: make width at the cheeks to compensate for the loss of the frame your hair once provided; choose an outline shape that contrasts with your head shape, not repeats it; draw a clean neckline about an inch above your Adam's apple; grow your beard up to the top third of your ear to seal the side burn gap; use matte balm to control shine around your bare scalp; and rework your length expectations based on the new proportions instead of the old frame — width and the outline shape fill in first, and shape adjustments and length adjustments are typically only done after a couple of cuts.

FAQ

Does a beard actually make a bald head look better, or is that just a style trend? It genuinely can, because a well-proportioned beard restores visual width and structure that a shaved head removes from the upper face. The key word is proportioned — a beard grown without accounting for head shape, shine, or scale can just as easily work against the balance you're going for.

When shaving your head, how often should you trim your beard? Most guys do best trimming the beard every 2 to 3 weeks and keeping the neckline and cheek lines cleaned up weekly in between. Since a shaved head has no hair to hide an uneven edge, the beard's borders tend to need more frequent attention than they would with a full head of hair.

Can you grow a full beard if your head hair thinned or receded first? Yes, in most cases beard growth is governed by different hormonal sensitivity than scalp hair, so plenty of men with significant head hair loss still grow dense, even beards. If the growth of the beard is also clearly patchy, it's usually a separate problem that should be discussed with a dermatologist rather than something that can be fixed by changing the style.

Is it bad to keep a short stubble beard with a shaved head? Not necessarily, but on longer or narrower face shapes, short stubble often isn't enough to rebalance the width of a shaved head. If you prefer stubble, focus on extending its width to the top of the ear and defining a clean neckline, since those two things do more for balance than length alone.

What beard shape works best for a round bald head? A beard with a squared-off, flatter bottom edge near the chin generally works better than a full, rounded shape, since the round shape doubles up on the head's existing curve. Aim for a flat line roughly an inch wide at the chin rather than letting the beard taper into a soft curve.

How do you stop a beard from looking disconnected from a shaved head? Extend the beard's growth line up to about the top third of the ear rather than stopping at the earlobe, and taper the last half inch with scissors rather than cutting it in a straight line. Checking the look from a side profile, not just head-on, is the easiest way to catch a gap before it becomes noticeable to other people.

Does beard oil or beard balm work better for bald men specifically? Balm generally works better than a high-shine oil, since bald skin already reflects light and a glossy beard next to a glossy scalp exaggerates rather than balances that shine. A matte-finish balm gives the beard the same non-reflective quality as a well-groomed bare scalp, which reads as more intentional overall.