Should I shave my neck when growing a beard?

If you’re new to shaving or even if you’ve been shaving for a while, it can be difficult to know what to do with your neck hair. If fact, it’s one of the most common grooming questions that you’ll come across online. Both men and women are

The correct answer is that as a general rule, you want to keep your neck trimmed with an electric razor until your beard is at least a few months growth. But, you can leave your neck alone for the first week or two whilst it’s growing out – neck stubble is fine, a neck beard is not.

Of course, different beards grow at entirely different rates, so ‘a few months of growth’ is quite a broad statement. It really does depend on the type of beard and look that you are going for.

If you want a short groomed beard, then it’s absolutely essential that you keep your neck trimmed after a certain stage. You can totally leave your neck hair alone for at least the first week, maybe two or three depending on the rate that your neck hair grows at. In fact, it can actually look a little weird if you trim your neck hair without having much of a beard there. I’m going to use Ryan Gosling as an example for this.

Here’s Ryan Gosling with may a weeks worth of beard growth. Could be longer, could be a bit less depending on how fast his beard grows. You can’t do anything about that either way; it’s just genetics. Aside from him being ridiculously good looking, he can definitely pull off this look with ease and it’s a good example of a little bit of a beard.

This however, is too far. This is a prime example of what you shouldn’t be doing if you want to appear neat and tidy – my guess is that if you turned up to work like this, you’d get fired (okay maybe not fired, but at least some weird looks). The beard itself here isn’t even particularly tatty, but it could do with a trim too. All this look needs is a trimmed neck and to define the jawline and he’d be an adonis once more.

Once your beard grows longer past this stage, you can start to forget about shaving your neck because the fullness and thickness of your beard will cover your neck entirely.

Conclusion

Overall, you definitely don’t need to shave your neck. But, between 1-2 weeks and a few months growth, there’s definitely a period of time in there where it’d pay to keep your neck trimmed down. This is especially true if you want to grow a beard in the corporate world, which is becoming more and more acceptable nowadays – in most cases, anyways.