When you are purchasing beard oils, you’ll quickly find that they can be on the rather expensive side. They typically come in rather small containers, yet they always want at least $10 for them, often more.
Just what is it about beard oils that makes them so expensive?
Beard oils use natural ingredients that make the final product more expensive, but even cheap oils can get away with using natural ingredients. The problem with a lot of the cheaper oils is that they use filler ingredients in order to make larger batches. Those larger batches reduce the size of their overhead. This allows them to sell it for a cheaper price, but the quality is usually worse. Big batches take longer to sell, which means that cheaper beard oils will, on average, expire much faster than more expensive ones.
Despite the fact that they can be expensive, there are a few smart tricks you can use to keep the cost of your beard oils low. We’ll look at a combination of storage and smart shopping to keep the costs down, and we’ll even explore how to make beard oils at home.
How Beard Oils are Made
Beard oil is an important part of beard care, but one question that should be addressed is just how important beard oil is. But before that, we need to understand what it is that beard oil does.
Beard oils are created from a mixture of a carrier oil, essential oils, and vitamin E oils (although many skip this step). Carrier oil, also known as base oil or vegetable oil, comes from seeds and helps to hydrate your skin and moisturize your beard. Essential oils are where the scent of the beard oil comes from, and the vitamin E oil is great for strengthening your hair; plus, it does a great job keeping your skin looking young.
Together, these three pieces make up your beard oil. Now which oils they use, how they are made, and the size of the batches will all affect the price. But before we look at how we lower how much we are spending, let’s talk about an alternative.
The single best alternative for beard oil is beard balm. If you use beard balm already, then you don’t need to waste more money by using it in conjunction with beard oil. The ingredients in beard balm will achieve the results you wanted from the oil while also serving as a leave-in conditioner to really soften your hair. Beard oil softens the hair a little but not nearly as much as beard balm.
Why Is It So Expensive
One of the problems with beard oil that can make it extremely expensive is the fact that it expires. We talked about this at length in this article, but the main point for our discussion is how you can adapt your shopping to waste less beard oil. Since we know that it expires, we should never purchase more than three types of beard oil at any given time. More than this and we won’t be able to use it all in time.
Don’t forget about the importance of storage. Beard oils go bad much faster when they are stored in hot temperatures. Cold temperatures can also have a negative effect on beard oils, although not as drastically. For beard oil longevity, store it in a dry, room-temperature location such as a medicine cabinet.
How To Make Your Own Beard Oil
There are a ton of videos online that teach you how to make your own beard oil, like this one:
Making your own isn’t hard at all, despite what you may have thought. You’ll need to purchase some carrier oil, some bottles, and some essential oils. You might also want to consider purchasing some pipettes to make it easier to bottle the oil afterwards.
There are a ton of different carrier oils—from avocado oil, to almond oil, to coconut oil and sesame oil, pecan oil, peanut oil, cocoa butter, or walnut oil, just to name a few.
Essential oils offer even more options—from parsley to rose, rosemary, basil, juniper, jasmine, lavender, sandalwood, spearmint, dill, cypress, and dozens more. All it takes to make your own is to mix these oils together. Choose one carrier oil to serve as the main body of the oil and then slowly add in the essential oils you want.
Making your own beard oil is time consuming, but it allows you to take total control over your beard. You can experiment with different carrier oils and different essential oils to create a different feel and smell.
It’s much cheaper to purchase the raw materials, and the homemade beard oil can be sold at local markets, online, or gifted to friends. This cheap alternative can actually put money back into your pocket, making it pretty much the opposite of expensive.
Are Expensive Beard Oils Really Just a Rip Off?
No, expensive beard oils are not rip offs. You might find them to be more expensive than you would like them to be, but that doesn’t make them a rip off. Expensive beard oils use more expensive and high-quality ingredients when compared to cheap brands.
Of course, a high-quality beard oil doesn’t make it any better than a low-quality one, depending on your criteria for judgement. There are plenty of lower-cost beard oil brands that create amazing products for competitive prices such as this one.
A more expensive brand is more likely to use natural ingredients compared to a lower-cost brand, but most brands have decided to use cheaper natural ingredients instead of resorting to chemically made ingredients. This trend is responsible for many of the amazing and affordable beard oils available today.
What’s Wrong With Cheap Beard Oils?
Cheaper beard oils do not necessarily mean lower quality. This would seem a logical jump to, but the truth is that there are a ton of low-cost beard oils that work just as well as the more expensive alternatives.
However, it’s important to know that there are some key differences between high- and low-quality oils. Keep in mind that this isn’t high and low cost, it is high and low quality.
Lower quality beard oils are often less expensive, but these two attributes don’t mesh one-for-one. A low-quality beard oil is most likely made from a large batch. Large batches mean it is cheaper to produce, but it also means that they use a base ingredient such as castor oil. This ingredient doesn’t do anything for you, it just simply makes it easier to mass produce and sell oil without the high overhead.
To avoid low-quality beard oils, don’t just look at the cost. Look at the ingredients to see if they serve any purpose other than reducing the quality and cost of production.
I Have a Short Beard, Should I Use Different Alternatives?
A short beard still benefits from beard oil applications. In fact, a stubble beard will still benefit from them as well. Beard oil has two key benefits for us bearded folk. Well, three if we count the smell, but that’s more of an added bonus.
Beard oil softens the hair of the beard. This makes the hair less rough and goes a long way in reducing the irritation of a scratchy beard. The other effect is that beard oil moisturizes and tends to the skin under the beard, which further reduces irritation.
If you have a short beard, you should still be using beard oil. The good news is that you don’t need to use as much of it, so you spend less money tending a small beard than you would a larger one.
Do I Have to Oil My Beard?
No, you do not have to oil your beard. Oiling your beard is in no way a necessary step to having a beard. In fact, all you need to do with your beard is nothing. If you don’t touch it, it’ll grow and do its own thing just fine.
The problem is that when a beard does its own thing, it typically sucks. It gets scratchy, it can cause acne, and it is far more likely to cause some form of irritation and frustration when it isn’t being taken care of properly.
Beard oil is one of the tools we use to reduce these problems. Less irritation leads to less acne. Softer hair leads to less scratches. Applying beard oil only takes seconds, but it can make your beard-having experience heads and tails more enjoyable.
Conclusion
Beard oils might be expensive, but they don’t have to be. There are wonderful companies offering cheaper alternatives without sacrificing quality. However, many cheap brands see a loss of quality not from the ingredients they use, but from the size of the batches they make during production.
You can always make your own beard oil quite cheaply by combining a carrier oil with some essential oils. Just don’t make the mistake of applying essential oils directly to the beard, as they will irritate the skin without the presence of the carrier oil.
While oiling your beard is important, don’t forget that it is the benefits of the oil you are after and not the oil itself. Beard balms can achieve the same effect and are often cheaper, making them a much better purchase in comparison. But they won’t earn you money like making your own does. Give it a try and really personalize your beard care.