Olive Oil for Beard Growth & Care: Benefits, Facts, & Myths

Here’s the deal; beard oils are expensive. Olive oil is not. So could you use plain olive oil on your beard as a cheap beard oil substitute?

That’s what we are trying to find out in this article.

We will look into the components that make up olive oil, how it impacts your beard growth hormones, and whether it absorbs well to the skin and beard hair fibers.

While olive oil is commonly used in cooking, it can also make a fantastic beard oil. Olive oil is rich in vitamin E and it can help moisturize the dry skin underneath your beard. Try mixing olive oil with peppermint essential oil or jojoba oil for a quick and easy DIY beard oil.

With all that information we can finally conclude whether olive oil is suitable for beard oil use, or should you just stick to consuming it as part of your diet (it is one of the best beard growth foods after all).

What is Olive Oil & How Does it Work

Olive oil is a popular culinary oil used heavily in the Mediterranean diet.

When you break down its fat distribution, 100 grams of olive oil looks like this:

• 14g Saturated fatty acids
• 11g Polyunsaturated fatty acids
• 73g Monounsaturated fatty acids

The fatty acid ratios make olive oil one of the healthiest fats to consume, and it gets even better when you factor in the impressive number of antioxidants present in the oil.

For men – and us, the beardsmen in particular – olive oil offers some rather interesting benefits.

You see, there is this Moroccan study where young men switched to using extra virgin olive oil as their main fat source for 2-weeks.

The results?

Their overall testosterone levels increased by a whopping 17.4%, whereas the luteinizing hormone (which is a hormone that is needed to produce testosterone) increased by 42.6%.

Since we already know that testosterone is the principal male hormone that triggers facial hair growth, we can put one and one together to see that using olive oil for beard growth – at least orally – might actually work.

But what about the topical use, aka. applying olive oil directly into your beard as beard oil?

Olive oil has some good effects on the beard and the skin underneath.

The most important factor, of course, is that it can moisturize the skin and soften the beard exceptionally well. This helps prevent beard itchiness and beard dandruff.

On the negative side, olive oil is quite thick in consistency, and its low molecular weight means that it cannot penetrate the beard hair fibers as well as some of the lighter oils like coconut oil or jojoba oil do.

Bottom line: Olive oil can promote beard growth through increased testosterone production when it’s eaten as part of a beard boosting diet. Using it topically on the skin may provide good moisturizing effects, but it’s also thick and greasy with not that good of an absorption rate.

Olive Oil for Beard Use: The Verdict

DIY Olive Oil Beard Oil Recipe

To make this beard oil, all you need is a dropper bottle (1 oz is a common size), some olive oil, jojoba oil, and any essential oils that you would like for scent.

(my choice of essential oils is always either balsam fir needle oil or spruce essential oils as they both smell nice and masculine and are androgenic).

Here’s the recipe:

• 0.4 oz extra virgin olive oil (roughly third of 1 oz. bottle).
• 0.6 oz organic jojoba oil (the remaining two-thirds of the bottle).
• 6 drops of balsam fir needle oil or the same amount of spruce oil.

The jojoba oil in this recipe is a perfect companion to the olive oil, as it’s lighter and very fast to absorb, balancing out the thicker consistency of olive oil.

Olive oil has a quite bitter scent, which means that you should use a strong essential oil to overpower the natural scent; balsam fir or spruce are perfect for this.

If you calculate the true cost of making this homemade olive oil beard oil, you can see that it can be just 1/10ths of the price of premade beard oils.

That’s a good way to see how the beard oil industry is overpricing their products. After all, their formulations use no superior oils than what we used here.

In fact, the beard oil industry is known for using bulk amounts of low-quality oils and even further diluting them to increase the profits.

Conclusion

Olive oil is a fantastic fat source that can enhance testosterone production and beard growth rate when consumed orally.

Using olive oil topically on the skin as part of your beard care routine is not the best idea, at least not if you use only olive oil.

This is because the oil is thick and greasy, and it really doesn’t absorb well into the skin by itself.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use olive oil at all in your beard care routine. It makes for a fantastic ingredient if you make a homemade beard oil with olive oil and some other higher molecular weight oils that balance it; such as jojoba or coconut oil.

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