Men's Grooming Basics: Hair, Beard and Eyebrows

Men's grooming comes down to three things: a haircut that suits your head and gets maintained every four to six weeks, a beard with a defined neckline and even length, and eyebrows tidied rather than sculpted. Add nails, nose and ear hair, and you've covered it. None of it is complicated, and it changes how you look faster than anything else available to you.

Hair: the highest-return thirty minutes you can spend

A good haircut reshapes your face. It can balance a long face, add structure to a round one, and give height where you want it. A bad one — or, more often, a good one grown four months out of shape — does the opposite quietly, and most men never connect the two.

The first thing to fix is who cuts it. If you've been going to whoever is nearest and cheapest and asking for "the usual", you have no idea what a cut that suits you looks like. Find a barber with a portfolio you like, book a proper appointment rather than walking in, and pay what it costs. It's not an extravagance at the frequency you actually need it.

The second is what you ask for. Turning up and saying "short back and sides" gets you a default. Instead, tell your barber three things: what your hair naturally does, how much time you're willing to spend on it in the morning, and what you don't like about how it's been. Bring a photo if you have one, but say what you like about it rather than expecting to come out identical — the photo is a reference, not a target.

Then listen to what the barber tells you. A good one will say if your hair won't do what you're asking. Hair that grows straight down won't hold a quiff without work. Very fine hair won't take a heavy textured crop. A cowlick at the front dictates certain things. Fighting your own hair every morning is a losing arrangement, and a cut that works with your growth pattern is one you'll actually maintain.

On face shape, the logic is balance. A longer, narrower face usually benefits from less height on top and a bit more weight at the sides. A rounder or wider face benefits from height and tighter sides, which lengthens the silhouette. A strong jaw can carry short sides; a softer jaw is often better with more structure around it. A receding hairline is nearly always better served by going shorter and owning it than by growing length forward to hide it — the concealment reads more clearly than the hairline would have.

Then go back. Four to six weeks for short cuts, six to eight for longer ones. The most common grooming failure is a good cut worn two months past its shape, and it's also the cheapest to fix.

Product: less than you think. A small amount of matte clay or paste worked through dry or barely damp hair covers most styles. High-shine gels photograph badly.

If your hairline is genuinely receding, that's a GP or dermatologist conversation rather than a shampoo one. Effective prescription treatments exist and they work best started early, which is worth knowing before you spend two years on supplements advertised next to before-and-after photos. There's more on where that line sits in the honest looksmaxxing breakdown.

Beard: the neckline is the whole thing

A beard either looks deliberate or it looks like you stopped shaving. The difference is almost entirely edges and evenness, not length.

The neckline is where most beards go wrong. It should not follow your jawline — shaving to the jaw makes your face look rounder and your chin weaker. The right line sits roughly two finger-widths above your Adam's apple, curving up to just behind each earlobe. Everything below that line gets shaved clean. Everything above it stays. Get this one thing right and a mediocre beard becomes a decent one.

The cheek line is more forgiving. For most men, leaving the natural growth line alone and just tidying the stray hairs above it looks best. If your growth is patchy and high on the cheek, a gently curved line from the corner of your moustache to the top of your sideburn cleans it up. Don't carve it sharp and low — a hard, straight cheek line drawn well below the natural growth reads as overdone.

Length and evenness. A trimmer with guards, used every few days, keeps a beard looking intentional. Shorter at the sides and slightly longer at the chin lengthens the face, which most men benefit from. Comb it down before trimming so you're cutting the actual length rather than following the contour of the hair as it sits.

Patchiness. If your beard has gaps, going shorter is the answer — stubble and very short beards hide unevenness that a longer beard exaggerates. A patchy full beard looks worse than clean stubble, every time. And beard growth largely finishes filling in through your twenties, so a beard that won't come in at twenty-two may be fine at twenty-seven. Nothing you buy will accelerate that.

Maintenance. Wash it with something gentle a couple of times a week — normal shampoo dries it out and dries the skin underneath. A small amount of beard oil after showering handles both itch and the flaking that a lot of men mistake for dandruff. Trim the moustache back off your upper lip so it doesn't end up in your food and your photos.

Clean-shaven is also a completely valid answer, and for a lot of men with strong jaws it's the better one. If shaving irritates your skin, the beginner skincare guide covers how to do it without the razor burn.

Eyebrows: tidy, not sculpted

Eyebrows are the most under-attended part of most men's faces and the easiest to overcorrect. The target is that nobody can tell you did anything — your face just looks a bit more awake.

There are three things worth doing and nothing else.

Clear the middle. If the hairs between your brows meet, remove them. The natural inner edge of each brow sits roughly above the inner corner of the eye — leave a gap there, and take out what's between. Tweezers, a few seconds, done. This is the single change that makes the most difference.

Take the strays. Individual hairs well above or below the main body of the brow, or out toward the temple. Only the obvious outliers.

Trim the length. Especially past your mid-twenties, when brow hairs start growing longer and wilder. Brush them upward with a small comb and trim the tips that stick out above the natural line with small scissors. Don't trim the whole brow shorter — just the ones that are clearly overshooting.

What not to do: thin the whole brow, create a defined arch, shave any part of it, or take a razor to the top edge. Male brows are supposed to be fuller and flatter than female ones, and a sculpted arch on a man's face is immediately visible as a thing that's been done. Over-plucked brows also grow back slowly and sometimes unevenly, so err heavily on the side of taking too little. If you're unsure, take half of what you were planning to and look again in daylight.

If you'd rather not do it yourself, most barbers will tidy brows as part of a cut, and a threading salon will do it in ten minutes for very little. Tell them tidy, not shape.

The rest of it, briefly

Nose and ear hair. A small rotary trimmer, once a fortnight, thirty seconds. Never tweezers up the nose. This is invisible when done and very visible when not, particularly in photos taken from slightly above.

Nails. Short, clean, filed rather than bitten. People look at hands more than you'd expect.

Teeth. Brush twice, floss, see a dentist. Nothing else in grooming competes with clean teeth for how much it affects a smile, and a genuine smile is what carries a photo.

Smell. Shower, deodorant daily, fragrance lightly if at all — one or two sprays, not six.

Clothes. Not grooming exactly, but the same category of easy win. Fit at the shoulders, trousers that aren't pooling at the ankle, shoes in good condition. A tailor costs very little.

Why this shows up in photos

All of this compounds in a camera. A phone lens renders detail with no forgiveness — a two-months-overgrown haircut, a neckline that isn't there, a stray brow hair — and the cumulative effect of a few small things being off is a photo that looks slightly wrong without anyone being able to say why. Sorted out, the same face photographs noticeably better.

If you're getting photos taken, do the grooming first: haircut a few days before, not the same morning, so it's had time to settle. The rest of the shoot — light, angle, expression and what to include — is a separate skill and worth getting right at the same time. Goatmaxx will tell you which of your shots is actually working and what's letting it down, which saves guessing.

And the reason to bother with any of this isn't that there's something wrong with how you look. It's that thirty minutes every six weeks and two minutes a day is a very small price for walking around looking like someone who takes himself seriously. That's worth it regardless of what happens on any app.

Common questions

How often should I get a haircut?

Every four to six weeks for short styles, six to eight for longer ones. Judge it by when the shape starts to go rather than by the calendar — a fade loses its definition within about three weeks, while a longer textured cut holds for two months. If you're regularly thinking your hair needs doing, you're already past due.

My beard is patchy. Should I keep trying to grow it?

Keep it short. Stubble and very short beards disguise patchiness; a long one advertises it. Beard growth also continues developing through your twenties, so it may fill in on its own over a few years. No product reliably speeds this up, and the ones sold for it are a waste of money.

Is it weird for a man to get his eyebrows done?

No, and it's more common than people say. The thing to avoid is the result looking done — a thin, arched, obviously shaped brow. Ask for a tidy: middle cleared, strays removed, length trimmed. A barber or threading salon will do it in minutes, and nobody will be able to tell beyond thinking you look a bit sharper.

How much should I spend on a haircut?

Enough to get someone competent, which varies a lot by where you live. The cheapest option in your area is usually cheap because it's fast and generic. Going somewhere better every six weeks is a reasonable ongoing cost and does more for your appearance than most things you could spend the same money on. Find a barber you like and stay with them — a barber who knows your hair gets better results each time.