You’re browsing through the beard styles of your favorite male celebrities. You’re looking for a nice yet achievable beard style.
There are so many styles, some are extreme, and some are difficult to achieve. At one point, your eyes lie on Charlie Hunnam’s stylish beard. The simplicity of his beard style paired with the possibility of achieving it makes you want that style to be your next one.
That’s exactly why we are here. In this quick guide, we’ll show you how to style your beard like Charlie Hunnam.
Prepare Your Beard
Before stylizing your beard like Charlie, you need to get your beard ready using four simple steps. Here’s how.
1. Clean Your Beard
Styling or simply trimming an unwashed beard can make your life a lot harder. You may have noticed how barbers often clean your facial hair thoroughly before beginning their careful trimming. A clean beard is much easier to style.
The easiest and most effective way to clean your beard is by using beard shampoo. It’s not recommended to use normal hair shampoos as they can harm your beard skin.
The strong soaps inside hair shampoos are designed to deal with oily hair scalp. Hair products, in general, shouldn’t be used on your beard as they will cause dryness and beardruff.
You should choose an appropriate beard shampoo and wash your beard properly with it. Make sure that the shampoo reaches all your beard hair and that the water you use is warm.
Water that’s too hot will hurt your beard skin, and water that’s too cold will tighten the skin pores. Once you’re done, use a towel to dry your beard from the water.
2. Condition It
Stylizing a beard is already a difficult process. Any mistake may force you to choose a different style or shave your beard entirely if your hand shakes too much. That’s why you should soften your beard to make your job a little easier.
Water and shampoo alone aren’t enough to give your beard hair the maximum softness. For that, you’ll need a reliable beard conditioner.
Place an amount equivalent to two peas of conditioner on your palm and spread it lightly over both hands. Apply the conditioner to your beard while making sure it reaches all of it. That includes your mustache too.
Don’t use too much conditioner or your hair might get too soft or too “moist” to stylize. You’ll then need to wait a few minutes while your beard hair takes in the conditioner.
During those few minutes, wash your hands with soap and water to get rid of the slippery palms. You don’t want your stylizing tools to slide on your palm and…well…it’s best not to go there.
When you’re done, use a towel to dry out the excess conditioner from your beard and mustache hair.
3. Then Oil It
It’s hard to talk about getting your beard ready for stylizing without mentioning a fan favorite; beard oil.
Beard oils provide nourishment to your beard skin and smoothen your beard hair even further. Generally, you can use any beard oil you trust, but we recommend argan oil, jojoba oil, and almond oil.
Just like the conditioner, put two drops on your palm and rub your palms together a few times. Then take your hands to your beard and thoroughly rub it with the oil. Once again, don’t forget your mustache!
You don’t need to use a towel on your beard at this point. The oil should stay on your hair for a while.
4. And Finalize by Brushing It
By now you should have a shiny, smooth, but quite a messy beard. Use a beard comb to brush your beard hair and align it in one direction. Your beard should always be brushed towards your chin.
Don’t brush too hard or you might irritate your beard skin.
Instead, take your time gently brushing the hair. Don’t be afraid to use your hands to help you align your beard hair toward your chin. They should be fairly clean at this point.
Styling Like Charlie Hunnam
Now that your beard is smooth, clean, and ready, it’s time to get down to business. Here’s how to style your beard like Charlie Hunnam.
Step 1: Trimming the Side Beard
Pick up your trusty trimmer and have it set to six millimeters using the length control tool. Charlie’s side beard is often a little lighter than his chin beard. However, it’s not excessively short, so don’t do any less than six millimeters.
This could be a little difficult if you have a thick beard. Your trimmer needs to be able to handle such a beard. Here are eight good trimmers that can do just that.
Once your trimmer is set to six millimeters, start trimming your side beard until it all reaches the same length. Be careful not to get too close to your mustache and chin beard. This should be a fairly easy step.
Step 2: Making the Sidelines
Now for a (not so easy) step. You’ll need some careful handling of your trimmer to get those sidelines even.
Take off the length control from your trimmer and start to even out the top of your side beard. To avoid removing more hair than you need, the direction of your trimming should always be upward.
This will ensure that even if you move your hand too much, the cutting edge of the trimmer will be directed away from your beard.
If you have your mustache and beard connected, don’t include that connection in your trimming. Charlie’s beard is well connected to his mustache.
In fact, there are various guides on just how to connect your mustache and beard together. If you already have it naturally, do yourself a favor and keep it.
Note: If you feel that you have good control over razors and prefer them for fine trimming, you could replace every fine machine trimming in this guide with razor trimming.
Step 3: Trimming the Hair Under the Lip
In the previous step, we mentioned that you shouldn’t include the connection between your beard and mustache in your trimming.
At this point, you should have even sidelines but the continuation of these sidelines beyond the untrimmed mustache are yet to be trimmed. You should use a narrow trimmer or a razor to even those continuations.
Charlie Hunnam’s chin hair reaches up to his lower lip but narrows down along the way. There are two hairless patches forming a U shape on both sides of that climbing chin hair.
Use your narrow trimmer in this area to make those U-shaped hairless areas. It would be very helpful to keep a picture of Charlie’s beard right next to your mirror so you can make those hairless patches exactly as he does.
Step 4: Trimming the Mustache
Wait for a second, we mentioned twice that we shouldn’t include the mustache in our trimming. Now we’re trimming it? What’s going on?
The point of not including the mustache in our trimming is that we need it trimmed down to three millimeters, not six as we did in the side beards.
You may ask: Why the hassle then? I could have just included my mustache in my six-millimeter trim and then trimmed it again to three.
It’s true. You could do that. However, it’s much easier for a three-millimeter trimmer to grab your full-sized hair rather than a six-millimeter hair. Your trimming will be faster, easier, and better looking.
With that out of the way, you should trim your mustache down to three millimeters. Do your best not to touch your side beard with the three-millimeter trimmer. Hunnam’s mustache is often lighter than his side beard and that’s what you should try to achieve.
Step 5: Straightening the Mustache
Charlie’s mustache is often straightened, evened out, and sharp looking. You could get away with skipping this step if you like thick mustaches. But we recommend doing it to get closer to Charlie’s style as much as you can.
Grab that narrow trimmer again and even your mustache hair as much as you can.
Your mustache shouldn’t have hairs that are protruding down to your lips, so do your best to trim those without narrowing your mustache.
Step 6: Trimming the Chin Beard
This step is the most important one. It will take the longest time and it will be the one that decides the most out of your final look. So, take a deep breath and get ready.
Charlie sometimes forms his chin beard into a pointy V-shape or a round U-shape. Whichever style of those you prefer, you should have a photo of it right next to your mirror.
Before you pick up your trimmer, comb down your chin hair to straighten those hairs and expose any uneven heights between them.
Now take your trimmer and start by evening the height of your chin beard. Once you finish the evening, you may like the result or you may need to shorten your beard even more.
Whichever your decision is, don’t do anything before you pick up that comb one more time and brush your beard hair down again.
Some uneven lengths in your chin beard will appear again, proceed to even them one more time.
Now it would be up to you to keep that length or trim it down a bit more. If you choose to trim further, keep combing in between the trims to catch any uneven lengths between hairs.
It’s recommended to keep alternating between the sides of your chin beard as you trim them. Don’t just take a trimming sweep from left to right.
Instead, trim some hair from under your chin, then some from the right side of your chin…and so on. The point of doing this is to reduce the possibility of over-trimming and minimize the effect of any mistake you might make while trimming.
Step 7: Trimming the Chin Line
The chin line is the downward extension of the beard that goes toward the neck and it often goes unnoticed by most people. Especially when they’re shaving at home.
The sharp trimming that was done on the mustache and side beard should also be done to that chin line.
Take a photo before trimming your chin line and another one after it. You’d be surprised by the difference.
There’s no specific style you should follow while trimming the chin line, simply make sure that there’s an even line throughout the chin line and you’re pretty much done.
Step 8: Dyeing Your beard (Optional)
This is an optional step since Charlie is blond and many people who want his beard style aren’t. If you do want to go the extra mile and dye your beard, you may go ahead with that. Just don’t pick Charlie’s exact beard color if your natural hair is too dark.
As a general rule, the beard color you should choose should be close to the medium shade of your scalp hair.
Any lighter than that would cause an obvious difference between your hair and beard colors. It may look unpleasant to most people.
If you’re committed to dyeing your beard, make sure that your beard is clean and dry before applying the dye.
Apply the dye to your beard using the recommended applicator, then wait for the dye to settle according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Once you get the results you need, wash your beard and you’re done!
Growing a Beard Like Charlie Hunnam
We now know how to style a beard like Charlie Hunnam. However, for those of you fine gentlemen who are still at the beginning of your bearded journey, you’ll first need to grow a healthy beard. Here’s how.
Eat Healthily
You’ll never see a gentleman with a fine beard who’s not keeping an eye on what he eats. The beard on your hair needs various nutrients to grow.
Getting a balanced diet with low fats and oils is essential to help your beard grow healthily.
Drink Enough Water
The skin of the human body is 64% water. Almost two-thirds of the environment where your beard hair grows is made of water.
If you compromise the water intake of your body, you run the risk of having various physical issues. Growing a healthy beard is one of them.
Keep Your Beard Moisturized
Beard oils, balms, and butter are all helpful products to keep your beard moisturized and healthy.
If you don’t moisturize your beard enough, you may end up with a dry beard, a scaly one, or some dandruff.
That can severely compromise your skin’s ability to grow a healthy beard.
Exercise Regularly
Regular exercise isn’t just for your muscles. It’s for your blood circulation and hormonal secretion.
Hair in the human body is controlled to a great extent by the testosterone hormone. That hormone is present in larger amounts in males which is why they have more hair.
Exercising increases the amount of testosterone hormone in the body which improves your chances of getting better hair.
Sleep Well
We just talked about how exercise increases the secretion of testosterone but guess what, the amount of that hormone isn’t the only thing that matters.
The regulation of its secretion is also as important. That hormone provides its maximum effect when it’s being secreted in normal circulation. And that should be done during your sleep time anywhere between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.
That’s why we said sleep “well” not sleep “enough”. You could have more than your fair share of sleep but at the wrong time of day which messes up your hormonal secretion cycle.
Sleep well…at the right time.
Give It Enough Time
Don’t give up on growing your beard unless you’ve waited long enough. You need to be aware that during some of that waiting period, your beard will look fuzzy and feel uncomfortable.
Be patient and let your beard grow. Gaining a good beard was never an easy thing. Otherwise, there won’t be websites and blogs dedicated just to it.
Let’s Wrap It Up
So, how to style your beard like Charlie Hunnam?
Start by getting a full healthy beard. Eat well, exercise, drink enough water and sleep well. Once you get to a beard size you can stylize, condition it and prepare it for trimming.
The stylizing itself is a few steps. Just shorten some areas and trim the others to make the hair look even. Follow the guide carefully and you’ll end up with Charlie Hunnam’s beard in less than an hour.
Fancy another celebrity beard? Check out this article to see how to grow a beard like James Harden.