How to Choose the Best Beard Scissors

How to Choose the Best Beard Scissors?

Beard scissors are indispensable for trimming your facial hair even if you’re already equipped with quality beard trimmers. Indeed, they offer superior precision and allow for deliberate cuts for either removing hair or touching up details.

In this guide, you will learn How to choose the best Beard Scissors

There are four essential things and a few additional features you want to take into consideration before purchasing a new pair of scissors for trimming your facial hair.

Make sure to focus on the steel quality, blade length, size and ease of grip, as these features play a huge role in your beard and moustache scissors performance and portability.

Nonetheless, premium quality shears often tend to be too large and very expensive. The goal is to find the right balance between the quality, size and price.

To make your search easier, let’s dive deep into explaining each of the four main factors and a few additional ones you should be looking for in beard scissors.

Steel Quality

At this point, it all comes down to deciding whether you will go with Japanese or German stainless steel.

Both of them are high-quality but differ in terms of sharpness and durability, thus offering different experiences. Japanese steel is more delicate because it’s more refined.

However, it has a curved cutting razor edge that gives an extremely precise and smooth cut. You can say that Japanese steel is one of the most precise materials there is.

Being more refined makes this steel more prone to dulling faster, which is why it requires to be sharpened regularly.

You’re probably guessing that German steel is sturdier and more durable to its Japanese alternative.

Its cutting edge is a little bevelled and because of that, it holds the hairs without allowing them to slip.

As the steel is less refined, it will pass quite some time for the German steel to dull or develop nicks. This, however, doesn’t mean you won’t have to sharpen them.

You will know the right time has come when the beard and moustache scissors start tugging and pulling your facial hairs instead of cutting through them smoothly.

Blade Length

The length of the blades is questionably one of the essential aspects of beard scissors. Back in the days, there were different shears for beards and moustache scissors were something else.

The ones for beards were long and moustache scissors were shorter because you would need to use them for close up work and detailing.

Just think about it – long scissors could chop a chunk of your moustache doing irreversible damage, while it would take an eternity to trim a beard with short blades of moustache scissors.

Nowadays, trimming scissors are mostly made in one, medium size blade length, but there are still some longer options available in case you have a bushier beard and want to give them a go.

Size

Professional hairdressers use beard shears that are usually long from 5.5 inches or 14 cm to up to 7 inches or 17.75 cm. These are the finest quality facial hair scissors you will encounter.

Obviously, 7 inches is far too long even for the biggest beard. If your facial hair is thick and long, 5.5 inches is an optimal size.

In any other case, trimming shears of around 5 inches is the best choice. For men who care about portability, travel beard and moustache scissors of 4 inches or 10 cm in length are unbeatable.

Ease of Grip

You will know that the beard and moustache scissors are easy to grip if their opening doesn’t squeeze your fingers, no matter the size of your hands. Finger rests are another great feature that you should look for.

They make sure to help you keep your hand steady while trimming. Finger rests are those bars at the bottom ring of your scissors that pop out of it.

There are shears with and without the finger rests, depending on your preferences. Also, you can remove some of them.

If you think about it, scissors with removable rests are the way to go, as you can take the finger rest of if you don’t need it. To do so, you should just screw out it of the bottom ring.

Handedness

Besides having a universal grip, most facial hair scissors are designed for right-handed people.

Fortunately, although there aren’t many of them, you can also find the ones for left-handed men, but you won’t always find them necessary.

More and more facial hair trimming shears nowadays are crafted for right-handed people, but still can be used by lefties too because some of their features qualify them for that.

Tension Screw

A circular knob at the place where the blades of the scissors are held together is known as a tension dial or screw.

As its name suggests, this feature allows you to change the tension of your shears. In other words, it brings both of the blades closer.

Many people think that this will also alter the sharpness of the scissors, but that won’t happen. For that, you will have to sharpen the blades or get a professional to do it for you.

Safety Tips at the Top of the Blades

It’s understandable that this is not something most men would consider important but think about it.

Extremely sharp top of the blades can be potentially dangerous, especially if you’ve got kids or pets or if you have a problem with shaky hands.

Travel Pouch

For bearded guys that are planning to use trimming scissors only at home, some fancy pouch or case is not a thing they care about too much.

Men who like travelling, however, can find a pouch for their scissors to be pretty handy.

Cases for facial hair scissors can be as big as glasses cases, with a special cut-out section inside or be smaller and made of nice leather.

Maintenance

Your scissors are likely to stay sharp for longer if you clean them after every use and store them in some dry place. Storing them on some wet place will cause them to rust sooner.

Of course, no matter how much you care for them, after around 6 months of use, it’s inevitable that the blades start dulling.

As soon as this happens, make sure to sharpen them to avoid that they tug or pull the hairs and cause uneven cutting.