About once a month (or so–depends), when it reaches the stage where vigorous brushing doesn’t result in a manageable mass of hair, The Beard begs to be trimmed back. (Yeh, I anthropomorphize the thing. You live with one on and off–but almost entirely on–for 40+ years and darned if you don’t, too. *heh*)
Below, just after stage one of trimming: bush hogging.
Note the “stragglies” (and the flat affect; this is after only one cuppa joe, so available facial expression is very limited). Stragglies require careful attention from barber shears. That’ll wait until after I am fully caffeinated.
BTW, this is as self-identifying as any photo of me anywhere available to the web gets, save for my DL, and it, at least, has some minor (very minor; almost non-existent) limitations on access. Other photos of me on the web (see my favicon for example) are less helpful to those seeking my face, not that anyone not suffering from some sort of traumatic brain damage wants to do so.
My brother’s was usually on most of his life. I did the trimmings. Talk about straggles! ?
Mine gets like that about once or twice a year. It generally takes about four tries to get it “clean”.
Not too long after and it starts growing long again. My wife thinks it’s overdue for a trimming again. Maybe after Christmas it will get it.
When it starts getting curly and trying to climb in my shirt (and in my ears!), it’s time for a bush hogging. . . and that’s about once a month.
Sometime before the end of the year, I’ll convert it to a well-trimmed VanDyke to enable a good fit for a respirator (for when I take down some ceiling materials to rework a room), since neither the mouse droppings nor the leftover poisons I used to kill off the mice (from an invasion during the flood) are welcome in my lungs.