One of the greatest legacies of the famous Italian General Giuseppe Garibaldi, was his iconic full beard style that is nowadays known as the “Garibaldi beard”.
The Garibaldi beard style is a full beard with the maximum length of seven to eight inches (roughly 20cm) that features a wide rounded bottom part. The beard is allowed to grow naturally with minimal trimming. The sides are typically kept short and the mustache should connect to the rest of the beard.
The Garibaldi facial hair is known to be a somewhat un-kempt beard style that suits a relaxed man, but there’s still some minimal trimming and maintenance involved just to prevent the beard from turning into a scraggly mess.
It’s a masculine and attention-grabbing look that compliments most face shapes – especially round, heart, diamond, and triangle shaped faces that have a narrow jaw and chin area, as the Garibaldi adds some bulk to the bottom of the face.
What Should a Garibaldi Beard Look Like
Here’s an old painting of Giuseppe Garibaldi, and that’s his beard.
As you can see, the mustache connects to the beard and is nicely trimmed above the lip but let to naturally grow on the sides.
The sides are relatively short, whereas the bottom part of the beard has a wide round shape.
The whole garibaldi beard style overall, looks almost like a naturally grown full beard that has just – well – grown for a couple of months.
NOTE: Even when a beard style looks like nothing has been done to it, that’s rarely the case. When it comes to Garibaldi, you do have to trim and maintain it, despite it’s natural look. If you just let your beard grow out for months without any trimming whatsoever, then you will get a scraggly un-kempt beard.
Garibaldi Beard Examples
How to Grow and Trim a Garibaldi Beard
The Garibaldi beard style can take a while to grow, depending on what length you want to go for. The length could be anything between a short Garibaldi (2 inches) to long Garibaldi (8 inches).
Since the average beard growth rate is ½ inches per month, it will take a minimum of four months to grow enough facial hair for you to attempt to trim and shape a proper Garibaldi beard.
Once you have enough beard hairs to begin, here’s how to trim and shape a Garibaldi beard…
Step 1. Shape the Bottom Part of Your Beard
The focal point of a Garibaldi is a wide and round bottom part. So take your best beard trimmer (without a guard comb) and start carving out a rough round natural looking shape that extends from your ear to ear.
Make sure to take off as little beard hairs as possible, so that you don’t accidentally make the area too narrow – which would completely ruin the idea of a Garibaldi facial hair in the first place.
Step 2. Define Your Neckline and Clean Up the Cheeks
Once you have the rounded bottom area trimmed down to roughly where you expect it to stay in, you can start trimming and shaving your neckline.
Simply place one or two fingers on top of the highest peak of your Adam’s apple, and create the neckline at that height from side to side.
Avoid trimming the neckline into too angular of a shape, instead try to mimic the round curve that you already shaped into your beards bottom area.
When you move into cleaning up the cheekline, you should also avoid too sharp edges, make it look somewhat round and natural.
Step 3. Trimming the Sides and Snipping Rogue Hairs
Start trimming the sides from the lowest point of your earlobes, go up until you meet the sides of your hair with a ~½ to 1-inch guard comb.
The reason you want to have short sideburns is to prevent your face from looking too round.
The Garibaldi is already a wide and round beard style at the bottom, but should definitely not be that way from the side of your head unless you want to look like a walking soccer ball.
Once you have the sides taken care of, grab a pair of beard scissors and start cleaning up the facial hair and snipping away any fly-away hairs you can find.
Step 4. Trimming the Mustache
There are two main rules to how you should trim your mustache with the Garibaldi, and those are to keep it somewhat natural and to make sure that the edges of the mustache connect and blend with the rest of the beard.
The simplest way to do this is to take your best beard scissors and just snip a clean little line above your top lip, and don’t even touch the sides, let them just droop down into the sides of your mouth.
What Face Shape is Best for The Garibaldi Beard Style
The Garibaldi is by far one of the safest beard styles to grow, as it suits all face shapes, and doesn’t look bad on any of them.
Still, the best face shapes for growing a Garibaldi are:
- Triangle
- Heart
- Round
- Diamond
Why these four? Well, it’s because all of them have a smaller jaws with a pointy chin. The Garibaldi beard is round and wide at the bottom, so it will add much needed definition and balance to your face shape overall.
This doesn’t mean that a Garibaldi would be a bad choice for men with oblong, square, or oval shaped faces.
It’s just that if you have some definition and width already in your jaw and chin area, then the extra oomph given by this beard style might make your face look really unbalanced and unnaturally wide.
Quick tip: If you do have a wide jaw and defined chin, you should try a beard style that features a narrower bottom part, such as the ducktail beard.
Garibaldi Beard Maintenance: Best Products
Contrary to popular belief, a full beard style such as the Garibaldi doesn’t require hundreds of dollars worth of beard products.
The most beneficial one to use here would be some high-quality beard oil to keep the facial hair moisturized and give it a bit of shine. I would recommend just making your own beard oil at home.
If your beard has a tendency to curl, then maybe a tin of beard wax could be a reasonable addition to the routine.
We do have a list of the best beard waxes here as well.
Of course, the basic grooming necessities will come in handy, such as beard scissors, beard brush, and a beard comb, but that’s about all you need really.
Conclusion
If you’re a guy who appreciates a natural looking full face beard style, then the Garibaldi might be the perfect one for you.
The rounded lower part gives men with heart, round, diamond, and triangle faces some much needed definition to their jawlines, and perfectly balances the face.
While it may take several months to have a long enough beard to sculpt the Garibaldi beard style out of, it’s certainly worth the wait.
