Top 10 Tips to Growing a Healthy Beard

Getting the most out of your beard can sometimes be tricky, but don't let all those ads convince you that you need to take 10 different supplements in order to obtain a healthy beard. While some of these tips may be obvious, they are still crucial to getting the most out of your beard you can. In the end, to grow a healthy beard, you need to have healthy skin underneath. If you are checking off each of these tips, you are supplying your beard with everything it needs. Here are the top 10 tips to growing a healthy beard.

1. Keep Your Beard Hydrated

While everyone's beard may be different, there is no doubt everyone's beard needs to be hydrated with proper oils. Without proper hydration, your beard can become coarse, brittle and over a short period of time can begin causing split-ends. The moment you get split-ends, you are preventing your beard from growing. Between the split-ends and breakage, your beard will soon become less full and very unruly.

How to combat this? An easy way to approach this is hydrating your beard through beard oils and beard balms. While you can get these products almost anywhere, the ingredients differ drastically. While other companies choose to focus on packing as many ingredients as they can in their oils and balms, Valkyrie only uses limited ingredients of the very best you can get. No fillers. With oils like Argan, Jojoba, and Sweet Almond, your beard and skin will be supplemented with the proper oils to help alleviate scratchiness, brittleness, split-ends, and “beardruff”. Keep your mane hydrated and your beard will naturally be healthier and denser.

2. Avoid Hot Showers

It's a wonderful feeling after a long day of work to step into a hot shower and just relax. While many share the same feeling, the damage it inevitably causes to your skin and hair is hard to counter. This is specifically true for your beard. Too hot of showers will literally scorch your beard and unfortunately rob it of nutrients and natural oils. Reapplying oils after the shower will help this, but the hot shower still sets your beard back quite a bit.

Instead, try keeping your bathing temperatures comfortably lukewarm, allowing your beard to maintain important nutrients and not be left with a brillo pad for a beard.

3. Consider Using Biotin

While I have posted a more in-depth blog about taking biotin, taking biotin is not a requirement as most people's bodies will naturally produce all the biotin you need. Also, while biotin can definitely help you grow your beard faster, it will not grow your beard in areas it does not already grow. Currently, only certain medications like minoxidil can do this, but they come at a cost and typically the hair that was gained will be lost once you stop using the product. While I think biotin is a safe bet, it's hard for me to recommend the medications.

4. Try to Avoid Touching the Beard

Every time you stoke that mane of yours, you are actually stripping the precious oils out of the beard. There isn't much to add on this other than try to be conscious of the habit. The more you can preserve the oils in your beard, the healthier it will be.

5. Avoid Sulfates/Detergents in Soaps

There's nothing like doing everything you can to keep your beard healthy, but resetting all your progress after washing your beard with sulfates. Sulfates are basically detergents that are often found in most store bought soaps and shampoos. The pro to having these sulfates is to obtain that super nice lather and all sorts of bubbles. But essentially what this is doing is cleaning the beard and skin underneath in a very harsh manner and end up causing damage to your hair.

When using sulfates, one can expect not only damaged hair, but your scalp and face can suffer from sensitivity. Sulfates can cause severe dryness and itchiness that leaves your beard brittle and rough. The more you scratch it, the worse it gets.

Valkyrie offers a sulfate-free bar of soap that can be used for not only your beard, but your entire body.

6. Drink Water, Often

During dehydration, your hair is one of your body's least priorities to maintain due to the lack of hydration in your system. Loss of hair, through shedding and breakage, can be caused by dehydration. Drinking water will not only help lay the foundation to a healthy and hydrated beard, it also helps in beard growth by not stunting its growth. Additionally, depending on how much sodium you have in your diet, more water intake may be a good idea just in general.

7. Lead a Healthy Lifestyle with Proper Diet

Having a well balanced diet is obviously ideal for many reasons, but it can also affect your beard, it's overall health and its growth. Including lean proteins like chicken, turkey and salmon can help produce the essential amino acids your body needs to grow your hair and beard which consists of a protein called keratin.

Vitamin A, B, C and E all have wonderful benefits towards proper beard growth and health. While leafy greens are a must, nuts, seeds, fish, eggs and grains like brown rice and oatmeal help supply all these vitamins.

Omega 3 fatty acids encourage healthy growth and helps hydrate your skin and hair protecting them from becoming dry and brittle.

Zinc helps regulate the testosterone in your body, keeping a beard growing at a steady rate. It's what your body uses to help repair your body and encouraging tissue growth.

An often culprit to hair loss, iron plays an absolute major role in producing the hemoglobin in your blood that literally carries oxygen throughout your body, repairs damaged cells while growing your hair and beard at optimum speed.

8. Plenty of Rest

Sleep most definitely has an effect on your beard. The same chemical in your body that regulates your sleep cycle also affects your beard and hair growth. When you lack sleep, or even a proper sleep schedule, you can also see not only a loss in beard growth, but you may lead to shedding as well. Getting the proper rest that your body needs helps your body do its job on all fronts, including producing needed ingredients your beard needs.

9. Have Patience

No man grows a thick viking beard overnight. It takes all sorts of time and dedication. When growing a new beard, people often find it scratchy and want to shave it off. While using oils can help alleviate the itchiness, this phase will only last a couple weeks. Then if you are someone, like myself, who have somewhat of a patchy beard, don't get discouraged and either trim it back or shave it off.
I can't emphasize this enough: Let. It. Grow. 

With patience, your beard will go through phases and thicken out to its full potential. The more patience you have and the longer you allow your beard to get, the more it may be able cover some of those unwanted patches. Additionally if you aren't combing or brushing your beard, start doing so now. It's not only hard to cover unwanted patches if your beard is going all sorts of directions, taking pride in your beard and making it look its best is part of the journey.

10. Let Genetics and Age Take The Wheel

Many overlook this fact, but genetics are the primary factor that determines how thick your beard will grow, whether it will be patchy and even your terminal length. While you can't change your genetics, making sure you are supplying your beard with everything else on this list will maximize your beard growing potential. While some before the age of 18 might start developing a beard, it typically doesn't fully mature until sometime in their 30s. Currently there isn't really much out there to help grow a beard past what your genetics can, so be proud of the beard you have and help maximize its potential.