When your friends have thick beards and you don’t, you might be worried and wondering about this question. If all beards grow at the same rate, does the fact that yours is thinner mean that’s as long as your beard is going to get?
Beards don’t all grow at the same rate. Different people’s beards will grow at different rates from one another. Genetics are at play here, but it is only one of the factors in beard growth. While diet and healthy living is the best way to speed up hair growth, the fact of the matter is that not only does everyone’s beard grow at a different rate, but a person’s beard will grow at different speeds throughout their lifetime.
Stick around to learn more about how beard hair grows, what lifestyle changes will make it grow faster, and how you can style a thin or patchy beard until it finishes growing in thick.
How to Make Your Beard Grow Quicker
Beards grow at different rates. It’s just the way of the world. Factors like the products you use on your beard and the way you diet and exercise will play a role in how fast your beard grows; but even if all of these were the same for every beard, it would still be different.
The problem here is that beard growth is ultimately up to your genes. Each person’s body has different genes, so each person’s beard grows differently. Unfortunately, this means that there are some people who can’t grow a very long beard. It also means that there are people who will take months and months to get a full beard.
On the positive end, there are people who can grow a beard in no time at all because of their genes. That’s awesome for them, but this doesn’t really help you if you aren’t one of those people. You might just be a slow grower.
There is also the chance that you are just caught in a particularly slow period of growing. The hairs on our body don’t grow in a uniform fashion the way that the hair on our head does. It grows in stops and starts with a mind of its own, so it can be quite difficult to predict how quickly your beard will grow. Sometimes it will grow quickly, sometimes it will grow slowly.
What you can control is how you take care of your beard and how you take care of yourself, which in turn takes care of your beard. It’s a wonderful, hairy cycle.
Factors of Beard Growth
It takes protein to grow beard hair, so make sure you’re getting plenty of it from chicken, fish, and beef. You’ll want to get your vitamin A, B3, B5, B6, B12, C, E, and F. The protein will help, but to get all this you’ll also need to eat lots of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. These foods are a reflection of what our ancestors ate, and they were known for their amazingly long beards.
This kind of diet is called a ketogenic diet, commonly referred to as the “keto diet”. The idea behind it is to eat only foods that are natural and simple. While I am not advocating that you follow a ketogenic diet, I do think you should use it to influence your choices. If you’re reaching for a snack, your beard will grow faster if you choose nuts and fruit over the candy bar.
One massive change that I am recommending is that you get enough sleep. When you sleep, there are two kinds of cycles you can enter. As you first fall asleep, you fall into a very surface-level sleep. But given a little bit of time, you enter into REM sleep. When this happens, your body releases the human growth hormone, somatotropin.
Somatotropin is used by the body to repair damage and help it to grow. Athletes would get in trouble for injecting this hormone because it gave them an unfair advantage over the competition, as their muscles would heal and develop so much faster. One of the better side-effects of somatotropin is that it helps your beard hairs grow as well.
Don’t worry, you won’t have to inject anything. The human body naturally releases somatotropin when you are in REM sleep. So, if you want to make your beard grow faster, make sure you get your beauty sleep.
Finally, exercise will help your beard to grow as well. It can help to increase the level of testosterone in your body, which in turn makes it easier to grow a beard. Working out also reduces the level of cortisol in your body, the hormone that causes stress, and stress and cortisol can slow down beard growth. So working out not only increases beard growth, but it also removes one of the factors that slows it down.
If you only take away one of these changes, working out is the way to go. It keeps your body healthy, but by eliminating a barrier and adding testosterone, working out is doubly effective compared to the other lifestyle changes.
If you want the biggest effect of all, try adapting all of these changes into your life and just see how your beard flows.
Is There Anything I Can Do To Make My Beard Grow Faster?
A beard transplant is an option that’s only open to those who are willing to spend a lot of money. This treatment costs thousands of dollars, but it transplants hairs onto your face.
That’s a lot of money for something that never, ever looks right.
A beard transplant never looks normal, despite what people claim. This treatment costs lots of money for an operation that only draws negative attention to your beard.
If you are considering a facial hair transplant, don’t. Let your beard come in naturally and style it as is so it always looks great. If it doesn’t come in as thick as you want, don’t worry. Woman love a stubble beard, after all.
I Heard Shaving Speeds It Up
This is the most common beard myth there is. Our eyes seem to confirm it when we shave, so it is easy to believe it, especially when people keep sharing it like it’s a fact.
The truth is that shaving your facial hair doesn’t make it grow any faster.
But when you shave, the hair is thicker as it grows back in. So, it must be growing thicker and faster, right?
Nope. Consider the way that hair follicles grow. They grow out of your skin the same way that the stalk of a plant grows out of the soil. The new part of the hair is the part that is the thinnest, but the root of the hair is where it is the thickest.
When you shave, you are cutting away the thin parts of your hair so that you can see the thicker root underneath. That root is thicker than the hair you just cut off, but it was always this thick. The thinner ends of your hair just blocked it from view.
So, while it looks like shaving makes your beard grow faster, this is unfortunately just a myth.
Am I Less of a Man Because My Beard Grows Slow?
Not in the least, but slow beard growth might be a sign that you aren’t eating enough. Those who don’t eat enough don’t have the extra calories necessary for the energy beard hairs need to grow. You need to also make sure that you are eating the right things when you are, as we mentioned earlier.
There might be other factors at play as well. If your hormone levels are out of whack due to medical issues, then beard growth will be affected. This can be either negative or positive, depending on the roll of the dice.
If you have a really long beard that suddenly stopped growing, don’t panic either. Your beard might have just reached its terminal length.
Try using essential oils with peppermint. You may also consider taking a high-quality, well reviewed beard growth supplement, too.
My Beard Grows in Patches, Is There Anything I Can Do?
The first thing you should do is not worry about it. This happens all the time. Your best bet is to wait. Shaving isn’t going to make it grow faster, after all. It’ll just start to come in patchy again and get on your nerves. This happens to lots of guys during the early stages of growing a beard.
Waiting for your beard to come in and even out is your best option, but that doesn’t help you in the moment when you’ve got a couple patches to deal with. For this, you’ll want to get some beard wax.
Beard wax will let you style your beard, and you can essentially use it to comb over the patches missing from your beard. It still won’t look as nice as a full beard, but it’ll look better than doing nothing. Don’t worry, most men only deal with patchy beards for a few weeks in the beginning of growing facial hair.
Conclusion
Every man’s beard grows at its own pace, but a fast and full beard starts with a healthy lifestyle. This is the secret to achieving the best-looking beard possible, with plenty of room for styling because you can rest easily by cutting and trimming it. When you’re healthy, you know that your beard grows smoothly and nothing can stand in your way.
So get out there and get work on some weight lifting to increase your testosterone level and some cardio so the vitamins and minerals in your diet can easily find their way from your stomach to your beard.
