You don't need beard oil. Your beard isn't going to fall out without it, and you're not neglecting yourself if you don't own a little amber bottle with a dropper. Men managed to grow beards for a very long time before facial hair became a product category.
You can grow a perfectly respectable beard without buying a damn thing from me. I realize this is an unusual way to sell beard oil. I've been doing this long enough that I'm comfortable with that.
I Wasn't Looking for a Market
I bought a house in 2008 and spent about a year straight working on it. Don't buy broken houses. By 2009, I was picking up hobbies again, with a rule that eventually they had to pay for themselves.
I made soap, candles and grooming products for my own use. Once a problem caught my attention, I wanted to understand it well enough to make something that solved it. Selling what I made paid for materials to make more. That was about as sophisticated as the business plan was.
Beard oil came out of that. As far as I knew, there wasn't a beard-care market to go looking for a gap in.
There's an old piece of business advice about avoiding any business where you have to teach the customer what the product is. I understand that now. In 2009, selling beard oil generally started with explaining why anybody would put oil in his beard.
The Oil in the Beard
What first caught my attention was Psalm 133. It describes precious oil poured on Aaron's head and running down through his beard, followed by the image of the dew of Hermon. For whatever reason, those images stayed with me together.
I started thinking about what I would want an oil for a beard to feel like. Something light enough to spread through the hair and leave it comfortable, with some protection at the surface. I didn't want a greasy coating sitting on my face all day.
That gave me something to work on.
What Does “It Works” Mean?
A common beard-oil origin story involves a man with a dry beard who tries everything, gets nowhere, then mixes some oils in his kitchen and finally makes something that works. Fair enough. I started by making things for myself too.
But “works” leaves a lot unexplained. An oil can make coarse hair feel softer without being a particularly complicated formulation. If that were the whole objective, there would be very little left to figure out.
I wanted to know what I could reasonably expect from the ingredients and what happened when I changed their proportions. How readily would the blend spread? How much would I need? Would my beard still feel comfortable a few hours later, or would I spend the afternoon wiping oil off my hands every time I touched it?
The Surface of the Hair, and What Happens Inside It
The visible hair shaft is predominantly keratin fiber. It isn't living tissue waiting to be fed, which is why I've always found “nourishing” an odd word to use for it. Your beard isn't hungry.
It can become rough and weathered, though. Friction and accumulated damage affect the cuticle, and damaged fibers can eventually split and break. I was interested in reducing that wear while keeping the hair manageable.
Lubrication at the surface can reduce friction as hairs rub against each other, clothing or a comb. That gave me a reason to want some material to remain on the outside of the fiber, although a heavy coating wasn't the feel I was after.
Hair also takes up and releases water as its surroundings change. The fiber swells as water enters and contracts as it leaves. That made moisture part of the formulation question, particularly if I expected the oil to feel comfortable in different weather.
I wanted to understand which ingredients stayed largely at the surface and which could move farther into the fiber. Balancing those properties was more interesting than choosing oils because their names looked good on a label.
Different Oils Behave Differently
Research on hair oils gives some useful examples. A study comparing coconut oil with mineral oil found that coconut oil could penetrate the hair shaft while mineral oil did not. Another study found reduced protein loss from damaged and undamaged hair treated with coconut oil.
Those findings concern the oils and conditions studied. They don't establish that any blend containing an oil will produce the same result, and they aren't tests of a finished Beardsman™ product. They do illustrate why ingredient choice can matter beyond scent or how an oil feels between your fingers.
In developing mine, I was balancing a wax ester with oils selected for their behavior on and within hair. Changing the proportions changed the feel. A blend could be too heavy, or feel too thin for what I wanted from it. Adding more of something useful didn't necessarily improve the whole product.
I also wanted to be careful about the explanation. Saying one ingredient “opens” hair and another “seals” it is an appealingly simple story, but that doesn't make it an accurate account of the chemistry. I didn't want to replace somebody else's beard folklore with my own.
The aim was a light formulation that gave me useful slip and surface protection while accounting for the hair's interaction with moisture. Whether I liked using it still mattered. A clever explanation wasn't going to make up for a greasy face.
New England Is a Pretty Good Laboratory
I spent a lot of time changing ratios and wearing the results. That was the enjoyable part for me. I could make an adjustment, see what it did, and have another question to work on.
The blend needed to spread through coarse hair without requiring half the bottle. I wanted enough lubrication to make the beard easier to handle, but I didn't want a heavy or waxy feel. Then I needed to live with it for more than one pleasant afternoon.
New England was helpful there. A humid August day feels quite different from January with the heat running indoors. We also get salt air, rain, snow, and spring afternoons that appear to be trying out several seasons before committing to one.
My beard and the way a blend felt in it gave me practical feedback through those changes. That was personal wear testing, not a controlled study. It helped me arrive at the feel I wanted.
Then I Sold It
The products started paying for the hobbies, and eventually there was a business. I sold directly in farmers-market-type settings and began wholesaling fairly early. People were paying for things I made, and retailers were selling them to other people.
The original beard oils went into amber laboratory-style reagent bottles with enormous ground-glass stoppers. They were ridiculous. I loved them.
I even wax-sealed them. It was a monumental pain, but handing somebody one felt fantastic. For local sales, the packaging worked.
Then I put Beardsman™ online in November 2014, and parcel carriers became part of the process. The bottles leaked or cracked. Those gorgeous stoppers became considerably less charming when I needed one to survive a trip across the country.
We changed the packaging. I had been judging it partly by the experience of handing someone a bottle, and shipping exposed a problem that experience hadn't shown me.
When Beard Oil Became a Business Category
Around that period, beard grooming was getting far more attention. Social media gave small companies a way to reach people well beyond a local market. The apparent economics of an ounce of oil in a bottle attracted plenty of new makers.
I understood the appeal. I had started with a hobby and some materials too. It was possible to buy oils and bottles, make a label, and start selling without much between the idea and the first customer.
The more bottles I sold, though, the more important the less interesting parts of the work became. I needed to be able to produce the same product again and account for what went into it.
In 2016, I Built the Machine
By 2016, I wanted Beardsman™ to run like a machine. I had always taken the making seriously. Now I was repeatedly producing for retailers and people around the country, most of whom I would never meet.
A formula needed recorded weights and a process I could follow again. Raw materials needed identities and lot numbers. Sanitation, temperatures where relevant, and packaging choices all belonged in that process rather than being left to memory.
If something went wrong, I needed to know what went into that bottle and where the others from the batch had gone. That doesn't photograph nearly as well as pouring oil from a beaker beside a rustic piece of wood. It does become rather important when you are responsible for what's in the bottle.
When the Marketing Lost Me
The actual science of hair and oils gives us plenty to talk about. Yet beard-care marketing often wanders into vague claims about feeding roots, nourishing follicles or stimulating growth, with very little explanation of what was tested.
Bullshit travels remarkably well when you put it on a nice label. Once a claim appears on enough bottles, customers have little reason to suspect everybody may be repeating the same unsupported idea.
I don't expect someone buying beard oil to investigate every ingredient study. I do expect the person selling it to be able to explain what the product does and where the evidence stops.
Beard Oil and Growth Claims
I don't sell beard oil as a way to cause new facial-hair growth. Conditioning existing hair and making it easier to groom are useful enough reasons for a product to exist.
Hair that is easier to handle may suffer less mechanical damage. Better length retention, where that happens, is different from making new hair grow. Those two ideas get blurred remarkably often in product descriptions.
In the United States, FDA identifies claims to restore hair growth as drug claims. Calling a product cosmetic beard oil doesn't remove that distinction.
If a company promises to fill the gaps in your beard with an ordinary oil blend, ask what evidence supports that promise. Having a patchy beard gives a man enough to be self-conscious about without someone using it to sell him an answer they can't substantiate.
You Can Ask Me the Same Questions
“Since 2009” tells you how long I've been doing this. It doesn't establish that a scientific claim is correct. An impressive beard, a workshop photograph and a long ingredient list don't establish that either.
If I say an ingredient serves a purpose, I should be able to explain it. The explanation should be clear about what I know and what I'm still working out.
And if better evidence changes what I understand, the explanation should change with it. Figuring things out is why I got interested in making these products in the first place.
So Why Buy Beard Oil?
If a little olive oil does what you want and you like using it, I don't have a reason to talk you out of it. The same goes for another oil or product that already suits you.
When you pay me for an ounce, you're paying for the blend I developed, the work of making it consistently, and how it feels and smells when you use it. You get to decide whether that combination is worth the price.
You also get to enjoy it. We spend money on good coffee and comfortable chairs without arguing that we would otherwise perish. Need is a remarkably low standard for deciding whether something has value.
A few drops of something you like can make an ordinary part of getting ready more pleasant. Your beard feels better to handle, and the scent may be something you look forward to. It might even become attached to a period of your life in ways you won't recognize until years later.
That's a reasonable thing to buy, provided the product is made responsibly and does what the maker says. I don't need to convince you there's something wrong with your beard first.
In 2009, I had to explain why a man would put oil in his beard. Seventeen years later, apparently I have to explain why he doesn't need to. That's progress, I suppose.