Growing an Evil Beard for Halloween? Here’s How.
Naked Armor
If there’s any holiday that appeals to our desire to dress up and role play it would probably have to be Halloween.
Published by Naked Armor
No other holiday in the American tradition gives us that much license for fun: from trick or treating, to walking around in one’s own best cosplay, to attending parties all around.
Depending on where you stand, you could be the guy who plans out his Halloween costume months in advance or you could be the other guy who waits until a day before Halloween before frantically making up a costume.
For the D-I-Y folks, this would probably be a piece of cake, but for us, lesser mortals, we’ll have to work harder than them.
Whichever way you go, there are three things to remember when choosing a costume: first, it has to be memorable; second, it doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg - which on All Hallow’s Eve might not really be the best way to splurge - and third, it should be comfortable.
How to be memorable? Dress up like a Villain!
If you want a costume, and by extension, a character that would be memorable enough in a Halloween party, then go dress up like a villain. They have great wardrobe.
Seriously, villains can give any hero a run for his money. They are always more memorable and more entertaining than your usual bland, straight-from-the-mold superhero. It helps that the best villains in literature and film are often tragic figures which make them more interesting to play with.
A great villain drives the story’s plot. Just think about Star Wars if Darth Vader wasn’t around to play the villain. It probably wouldn’t have stayed long in our collective cultural consciousness enough to spawn six more movies. Or take the case of Batman. It’s more fun to watch a Batman story with a Joker in it, rather than without. Because nothing props up a movie more than an outrageous villain.
Even Harry Potter had to rely on Lord Voldemort to give his movie the thrills. When you think about it, Voldemort and Potter were two sides of the same coin. They both came from tragic circumstances, but each chose differently, so they ended up on opposite sides.
The Fascination For Villainy
As it turns out, there’s actually a public fascination for villains. Even Netflix admits this, saying that people respond better to images of supervillains than heroes on its film archive. Curious about this, we googled this topic online and came up with some clarifying answers on this matter.
Says the Jewish writer, Edmon J. Rodman, the fascination lies in seeing a little of yourself in the villain. He pointed out that there is an internal duality of good and evil in a person and that allows him to find sympathy for villainous characters.
Similarly, for novelist Charity Bishop, this interest in villainy is simply a natural offshoot of human nature. Human beings, being naturally curious, are fascinated by not just what transformed them into villains but also what keeps them there, she said.
Cultural analysts, meanwhile, look at villains as an archetype. Taking a page from Jungian psychology, they said that a villain serves as a symbol for the moral decay of a society or as a symbol for revenge, so that they can produce a sense of justice or of closure for the collective unconscious.
Right now though, we’re sure your unconscious is looking for a sense of closure about your costume dilemma. So let’s get back to the topic at hand.
Not wanting to spend too much? Work with what you have.
Now if there is anything that’s a dead giveaway for a villainous character, it would have to be a beard. More specifically, a goatee beard.
It’s a common trope in television and film, and women love it. If you have to have a villain wearing a beard, it has to be a goatee. TV Tropes calls this the Beard of Evil. According to the site, “The Beard of Evil has a long history of being associated most closely with the Evil Twin or Evil Counterpart. It also scores extra evil points if combined with a shaven head.”
Now, we’ve always thought of this as an unfair imposition on what is otherwise a nice, elegant beard style. Just take a look at Dr. Strange and Tony Stark, both of whom have nice, sharp and sexy goatees. Would you call them evil?!
But apparently even science agrees.
At the University of Warwick, Drs. Derrick Watson and Elisabeth Blagrove have found out that the downward pointing triangular shape that a goatee gives the face is downright threatening for most people.
In their study, they found out that when people shape their eyebrows into something that suggests a downward facing triangle or grow a goatee to make their chin look pointy, their face takes on a negative expression. And people respond to it negatively.
Perhaps it’s a cultural thing; after all, even before their study, medieval painters were already painting the Devil with a sexy goatee. Whatever the reason, it’s deeply ingrained in our collective social conscious that anything triangular, like a goatee, can have sinister implications.
In this case though, it works to our benefit. Because the long and short of it is that if you’ve got a beard, then you can turn that into an Evil Beard which you can wear as a costume for your villainous character to any Halloween Party.
A Naked Armor razor is perfect for beard styling because the blade is topped off with rounded Dutch points to ensure that the razor smoothly shaves your stubbles and trims your mustache sharply without getting you cut unnecessarily as one would with a square point razor blade.
— D'Rock, Naked Armor Founder
How To Turn Your Comfortable Beard Into A Sinister Goatee
Now as goatees go, there are a lot of styles. All of these are worth trying on, especially if you’ve got the facial contour for it. For the purposes of your Halloween costume though, we are going to zero in on those styles which have been, unfortunately, appropriated by card-carrying villainous stereotypes.
● The Pointed Beard
Also known as the Ducktail Beard, we generally like to call it the devil’s beard because that’s how medieval painters often painted satyrs and devils: with lush pointed beards on their chins. Why? The better to tickle, we suppose.
If you already have a full beard, then it’s easy peasy converting it to a pointed beard. Just trim it accordingly. However, if you’re starting from scratch, then you should have started growing out your beard four months ago, so that you would have enough hair to work with before your Halloween party.
Bespoke Unit offers more specific instructions:
First, you need to wash, blow-dry and brush your beard down into place before starting. Get a pair of clippers, hold them vertically while running them down from the cheeks towards the tip of the beard’s growth. This will taper the top and sculpt the undergrowth. To ensure symmetry on both sides of the chin, trim each side, step by step, while regularly brushing the beard to isolate any stray hairs. Lower or neaten the cheek lines and carefully define the neckline. As always, we recommend a straight razor during this part as it will allow you to be more precise in defining the beard line.
Depending on how devilishly sexy you want to look, you can opt for a pointed tip or a slight curl, the latter done by twisting or rolling the tip back on itself.
● The Fu Manchu Style
Named for a villainous mad scientist from a series of books and films with his name on it, the Fu Manchu will, unfortunately, take months of preparation. That’s basically because you need to grow it out from the upper lip without any attachment to the face.
Shave the hair on your upper lip relatively short except at the ends. Let the excluded ends grow out extensively and train them to hang perfectly downwards with the use of a mustache wax.
Beardoholic recommends these steps:
Grow out all your facial hair and only trim the rest of it when the mustache has grown out fully. Continue to groom the mustache 2-3 times a week to ensure that only the hair at the ends are allowed to grow. Shave the rest of the face after a day or two.
One can use a trimmer, but we prefer a straight razor for a cleaner trim in order to shape the mustache to the desired style and to prevent the other parts of the mustache from growing long and bushy. Shave the rest the beard cleanly to allow the mustache to hang straight down physically.
Apply mustache wax as you pull down the beard. Repeat the procedure until the hair hangs down naturally to the chin. When it has fully grown out and can hang down properly without any pulling, then congratulations, you’ve now got a Fu Manchu mustache.
Get Into The Halloween Spirit With A Straight Razor
Of course, all of this may sound tedious and require a lot work. But you can pull it off if you use the right tool. And that’s why you need to use a straight razor.
Yup, nothing like another unfairly maligned product to pair with an equally unfairly maligned beard style. Between the straight razor and the pointed beard lies a long history of horror stereotypes, from film to literature.
Still, we gotta admit, nothing does the job better than a straight razor.
A straight razor will give you total control over the pressure and shaving angles needed to achieve these beard styles. Its sharp blade can cut close to the skin in the least amount of passes, giving you a close and clean shave.
Here at Naked Armor, our artisanal straight razors are fitted with sharp world-class Japanese steel blades and luxurious, valuable sandalwood handles.
A Naked Armor razor is perfect for beard styling because the blade is topped off with rounded Dutch points to ensure that the razor smoothly shaves your stubbles and trims your mustache sharply without getting you cut unnecessarily as one would with a square point razor blade.
So yeah, choose a straight razor to get your evil Halloween beard down to pat and count how many fang-tastic beard compliments you'll get. Of course, though, you can always just chuck out the preparation and opt for the fake villainous beards. But where’s the fun in that? See you at the parties!
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