Beard Oil & Its Ramifications

So, beard oil is a thing that exists. I was intrigued that, thus impart­ed to me, in fact, some peo­ple oil their beards. The first thing I dis­cov­ered is that beard oil is fuck­ing expen­sive. The next thing I dis­cov­ered is that mak­ing your own is only a mod­icum less fuck­ing expen­sive. Dis­mayed but not daunt­ed, I final­ly came across Dream Beard Oils and felt com­fort­able drop­ping $12 for 4 dif­fer­ent sam­ples.

Be pre­pared: oil­ing your beard feels deca­dent, friv­o­lous and affect­ed. This will not be a prob­lem for those who aspire to lom­bardy due to style con­sid­er­a­tions, but is a bit uncom­fort­able to those of us who are instinc­tu­al­ly pre­dis­posed to face fur.

You don’t use much, per­haps 10 drops for a full beard. Your beard does­n’t get oily. I used more oil on my chin than else­where. I imme­di­ate­ly noticed a change in both the albe­do and grit of my beard as well as a sooth­ing of the under­ly­ing skin, a balm I was­n’t aware was need­ed. I antic­i­pate a con­comi­tant decrease in sta­t­ic charge dur­ing cold dry win­ter.

I assume that, in addi­tion to keep­ing the skin healthy, the oil on the beard pre­vents the skin from los­ing fur­ther mois­ture to the hair.

If you don’t feel the neces­si­ty of ascrib­ing to the use of rare oils and sundry tinc­tures that add cost and scent but pro­vide dubi­ous effi­ca­cy, buy­ing a nice high-grade food oil like grape­seed oil will do the trick and be much cheap­er.

I am scent agnos­tic at this point. I am not a cologne or after­shave man, but a light nat­ur­al scent to my beard does appeal. I could just as eas­i­ly go with some­thing unscent­ed. I think that the occa­sion­al heav­ier oil­ing and then groom­ing with a semi-porous nat­ur­al-mate­r­i­al comb (wood, prob­a­bly) would also be ben­e­fi­cial. Even­tu­al­ly enough oil would sat­u­rate the comb that a light run-through would even do the trick.

A bit about the scents from the Dream Beard sam­pler:

• “Beard­ed Bar­ber” has a pre­dom­i­nant­ly astrin­gent tea tree scent. Per­haps a hint of flower. The smell fades with­in a cou­ple of hours, and is not strong to begin with.
• “Mechan­ic” is patchouli. I’m guess­ing this choice was made because mechan­ics and hip­pies are both greasy? Not gonna use this one again.
• “Lum­ber­jack” smells piney. Imag­ine organ­ic Pine-Sol or a free-range, ver­ti­cal­ly farmed car air fresh­en­er from “Repo Man” and you get the idea.
• “Car­pen­ter” has a pleas­ant wood smell, but isn’t imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fi­able. I like it the best.

After a few days of use my beard is a notice­ably less wretched tan­gle, and my skin notice­ably health­i­er.

Still feels stu­pid though.