Don’t it during the summer. I grew mine over Christmas vacation one year nearly 45 years ago. I had tried the previous summer and it was awful. My beard is very curly, very heavy, and hard to shave. I had a five O’clock shadow by noon. But when I gew it in the winter, no problem at all and it looked pretty good in a week. For a while I shaved my cheek pouches, but after a couple years, I gave that up and haven’t touched a razor to it since. I get it trimmed by the barber fairly short, but it comes back pretty quickly. One minor advantage is that it is so curly that I sometimes got in-grown hairs under the skin. That has stopped completely.
I forgot to say that by the following summer there was no itch at all.
Some guys, like me, just can’t grow a beard, no matter how patient. Large areas of my face are completely devoid of hair, ie. my cheeks, the sideburns-to-be and the skin at the corners of my mouth. What’s there is very mottled, ranging from light sand to black in color. The only decent part of my my “facial” hare is, like BigNik’s, the underside of my jaw where the hair is thick and black.
Shave the neck? Doing that gives me itchy, pimple-like spots all over the throat. My dermatologist tells me they have nothing to do with acne and that the only cure for them is to abstain from shaving. Tough luck.
I can’t imagine what you’re thinking. The longer you let it grow, the more it’s going to look “scruffy” by today’s grooming standards. You have to spend a lot of extra time (and/or money) to trim it and make it look “intentional” before anyone’s going to compliment you on your facial hair.
Which is why I’ll never understand why anyone would go to so much trouble, in this day and age of cheap disposable razors.
And don’t think that, if you let one very little part of your beard–like the end or your chin, or just under your lip–grow into a really long, wispy thing, that you’re going to look creative or bohemian or interesting in the slightest. It just looks creepy, like you’re some kind of child molester.
Hmm, I can buy a bunch of razors and shaving paraphernalia, spending 15 valuable minutes or so every day shaving, or I can save my money and my time and let nature take its course. Man, a beard is so much trouble!