Face Form Finder

How Long Does It Take to Grow a Beard? Start the Clock on the Right Day

The clock starts on the last day that patch was cut to the skin

Not the day you decided to grow it. Not the morning the razor went into the drawer. A patch of beard starts its clock the last time that patch was taken down to the skin, and the clock runs per patch rather than per face.

This is how two men can make the same decision on the same morning and finish months apart. One of them took everything off. The other kept a moustache and a chin strip going, and both of those areas had length in the bank before either man decided anything.

What does not restart it, and what does

A neckline trim does not. A cheek line does not. In both cases you are tidying the edge of the beard rather than the body of it, and the hair you are waiting on never stopped growing.

Taking length off is the thing that moves the clock. Cut ten millimetres from the chin and the chin's clock goes back by the time it took to grow those ten millimetres. Nothing else on the face moves with it.

So the answer to "I trimmed last week, do I start again?" is narrower than it sounds. You start again on the patch you cut, and only by the amount you took.

Count the length you already have as time already served

The usual figure assumes you begin at zero length. Almost nobody begins at zero, and the hair already sitting on your face is time you have served.

Work from 0.35 mm a day, which comes to about a centimetre a month and about fifteen centimetres a year. At that rate a single millimetre is roughly three days, and ten millimetres is roughly a month.

Those weeks are behind you, not in front of you. Men who skip this step hand themselves a longer wait than they have: they read a range of months, look at a chin that is already covered, and start counting from today.

Turn the length you want into weeks

The arithmetic is one division. Take the length you are aiming at in millimetres, divide it by the daily rate, and what comes out is days.

Round your answer up. The rate is an average across a great many hairs, and an average is not a schedule for one face.

Why a patch can sit still and still be on schedule

Ten to fifteen per cent of the hairs on a body are in their resting phase at any one moment. They stay anchored in the skin, they add no length, and they do not start again until their turn comes round.

A patch of beard is not one clock, then. It is a crowd of them running out of step, and the length you can see is the sum of the ones that happen to be growing.

That is why a cheek can look frozen for two weeks and still be on track. It is also why a grow-out often has one week where the beard looks thinner than it did the week before. The resting hairs come out, and the patch has to be refilled from the follicles behind them.

The date is a floor, not a promise

A rate slower than the one above pushes the date out. A patch that already carried length pulls it in. Neither of those is a problem you have to solve.

What you should not do is try to move the date by trimming. Taking length off does not bring the finish any closer. It moves the finish line back by exactly what you removed.

What the date is worth

A date does the one thing a stage chart cannot. It tells you when to stop looking.

Set it once, write it down, and check the beard on that day rather than every morning in the mirror. Nothing you do in between changes the number.

If the date you get lands you at a length you have not settled on yet, the length examples for round, oval, square, heart and oblong faces are in Beard Styles for Face Shapes.