So you let the life get the better of you, ate a little too much, and ended up gaining a lot of weight.
Now your face is chubby and you are wondering if you could make it look thinner with the help of a proper beard style; a big guy beard style to be precise.
The question is: Can you?
The short answer is yes, but it’s important that you read through this article carefully to understand how exactly do you shape and sculpt the facial hair in a way that it makes your face look slimmer…
Because even though a beard can make your face appear thinner, it can also easily make your face look even fatter than it already is, if the choice of beard style is bad.
Can a Beard Make the Face Look Thinner
When you trim and style your face properly, it can be used to make your face look thinner and appear slimmer.
When you gain weight, the fat tends to accumulate in your cheeks and jawline, making your face seem rounder, softer, and also shorter – and that’s the trio that is responsible for a “fat looking face”.
To use facial hair to make your face appear slimmer, all you need is to reverse-engineer the apparent roundness, softness, and shortness of the face.
In other words, you need to match a beard style with your face shape, and if you’re fat, your face shape is more than likely round.
This can be done by shaping your beard in a way that adds vertical length to the face, adds no horizontal width to the face, and has sharp angular edges around the jawline. It’s essentially exactly the same process as choosing a beard style for a round shaped face.
Can You Really Hide a Fat Face with a Beard
It’s true that you can hide a chubby face with a beard, but that’s only possible to a certain extent.
If your weight is creeping higher and higher, there will be a point where even the most optimally trimmed beard style won’t work to hide the face fat. Sure it helps, but eventually the pounds will become apparent.
With that being said, you’d be surprised just how effectively you can hide a double chin with a beard – IF you know what you are doing.
You see, growing a beard means that you’re adding more stuff to your face than what is already there, which when done poorly, can actually make you look even fatter than you really are.
How to Make the Face Thinner with a Beard
The above is a great tutorial in shaping a beard so that it looks thinner by BeardBrand.
Trim and Shape the Beard Properly
The beard trimmer and knowledge about how to properly utilize it are two things that you need to master if you want to trim and shape out a beard style that will actually thin your face out.
Alternatively, you can always go to a barbershop and have them trim and shape the beard for you. Just say “Hey, I’m in need of a beard style that would make my face appear slimmer, is that possible?” and any barber worth visiting should know exactly what to do.
The key factors for properly trimming a beard style for a fat guy:
- Taper the beard so that its very short on the sides, but has plenty of hair around the jawline and bottom parts of your face. This gives an immediate slimming effect.
- Make sure the neckline of your beard is low enough to completely hide the soft fat underneath the chin. 1-2 inches below your real jawline is a good rule to follow.
- When defining the shape of the beard, use sharp angles to help create a visual impression of a defined jawline and chin. Roundness only accentuates the chubby look.
Straighten the Beard and Use Products
Many guys have thick and coarse beards that don’t really lay flat against the skin. This can exaggerate the width of the face, especially if it happens on the sides and upper cheeks.
Ultimately, trimming the sides to very short length is the best option, but utilizing the right beard products can help a great deal too when the goal is to make the face appear thinner and less wide.
If your beard is curly, then that will also accentuate the width and roundness, which isn’t ideal when the goal is slimming down the face.
The products you want to be using are:
- Beard wax (see our list of best beard waxes).
- Beard brush (see our list of best beard brushes).
- Beard straightener (see our list of best beard straighteners).
The goal should be to first straighten out the curls with a heated beard straightener (preferably in the morning).
Then follow up with a pea-sized amount of beard wax to help extend the straightening results and really push the beard hairs to lay flat against the skin.
And lastly brush everything neatly into place with a beard brush, and enjoy the perfectly styled slimming facial hair that will always keep its shape for a full day (and sometimes even longer).
Best Beard Styles for Fat Chubby Guys
Tapered Full Beard
Like I said, a chubby guys beard style should have very short sides to reduce the width, and longer chin to add length to the face, and buff angular jawline to reduce the roundness.
Tapered full beard ticks all the three boxes.
The tapered beard features short – almost completely shaven sides – and the beard hairs gradually increase in length towards the jawline. How you shape the bottom part of your beard is up to you, but for chubby cheeked guys it’s recommended that you stick to sharp and defined angles.
The short sides that taper will create the illusion of a square/oblong face shape, and the longer you let the chin grow out, the less round your face will appear as a result.
Short Boxed Beard
The short boxed beard is known for its evenly trimmed length of ½ inch and the fact that it’s so squarely shaped and neatly groomed that it literally frames a “box” around your face.
It goes without saying that this is a great beard style for fat guys, as it makes the face look more square and less round.
If you have paid any attention, you have probably seen that this is the go-to beard style of many chubby (or used to be chubby) actors and celebrities, including: Kevin James, DJ Khaled, Zach Galinafkis, Seth Rogen, and Jonah Hill.
The Ducktail Beard
If you want a big and bold beard style without making your face appear any wider or rounder, you have to try the Ducktail beard.
So what is it?
It’s a beard style that has a length upwards from 4 inches and features a pointy angular chin that resembles a duck’s tail. The sides are typically kept very short, and the jawline is shaped like a square with almost a 90° angle at the connection point where the “jawline” of the beard ends.
This is the perfect style for a chubby guys face, as it:
- Masks all the roundness and soft features.
- Adds no width thanks to the short sides.
- Has a pointy chin that adds vertical height to the face.
- Has a jawline that is sculpted into a sharp square.
As a big beard style, this takes a while to grow (around 8 months in fact) and shaping it can be difficult if you’ve never done it before. That’s why I recommend that you – at least for the first time – get it shaped by a professional barber.
The Hollywoodian
The Hollywoodian beard is a classic beard style that is getting to be quite rare these days.
It’s almost like a short full beard at ½-1″ length, but the sides and the upper cheeks are clean-shaven, with the beard being mostly just around the jawline.
This style does resemble a chinstrap, but it’s longer at the bottom and it creeps up higher up the cheeks. Those two reasons are also why it looks much better than a chinstrap.
The hollywoodian is a great beard style to match a fat face, as it adds zero amount of width thanks to the shaved sides and upper cheeks, but it adds some length to the face and definition to the jawline.
The Verdi Beard
The Verdi beard style is a full face beard style that features a thick mustache typically curled up or styled to the sides and a full beard that is kept short at the sides and grown somewhat naturally at the jawline.
Aside from the ultra-styled mustache, this beard style is minimally groomed.
There are few good reasons as to why it matches well with a chubby face:
- The Verdi has short sides, every chubby face needs short sides.
- The Verdi has a length of 2″+ so it adds height to the face.
- The Verdi has a strong mustache that frames the face and masks roundness.
The Garibaldi Beard
The Garibaldi beard style is a big natural looking full face beard that features short sides, naturally grown mustache that connects with the facial hair, and a big wide rounded jawline.
The length is typically 2-6″, so this beard style is definitely a long one. But thanks to the length it helps add some vertical height to your face, which has a well-known thinning effect.
At first you might think that a beard style that features a big wide rounded bottom would fit very poorly to a face that is already wide and round, but the thing is that all of this width and roundness is at the jawline.
The sides are kept very short, so the style actually only accentuates the jawline, without making your face any wider.
Conclusion
So you’re a heavy guy with chubby cheeks and some face fat?
That’s fine, you can easily use a beard to make your face appear slimmer and reduce its roundness with some angular shaping and trimming.
Choosing the right beard style for a fat man can work wonders for your overall style, and while it doesn’t actually make you slimmer, it creates a visual impression of a thinner face and that’s still better than nothing, right?
