Why Coconut Oil in Your Beard Is Worth Its Weight in Gold
Alongside the care products loaded with chemicals and alcohol that you'll find in any high-street chemist, plenty of men are asking what nature actually offers for giving a beard a proper treatment. In today's blog post we'll take a closer look at coconut oil, or coconut fat, and explain why coconut oil in your beard is a genuine treat for your facial hair too.
Where coconut oil comes from
It starts with the coconut palm and its fruit, the coconut.
From these, the white to yellowish plant fat is extracted from the copra, the nutrient tissue inside the coconut.
Coconut oil, or coconut fat.
The name coconut fat comes from the fact that coconut oil is solid at room temperature rather than liquid. Fat, in other words.
As mentioned, the extracted coconut oil or fat ranges from white to a slight yellow. Beyond the faint coconut note, it smells mild and somewhat waxy.
Its high saturated fat content makes it extremely stable in storage, but it will still smell faintly rancid now and then once it has sat too long. Even so, it brings serious benefits as part of a care product, which is exactly why coconut oil in your beard is not to be sniffed at.
The differences:
Coconut oil comes as either virgin or refined oil. The difference lies in how it is extracted.
Virgin oil is produced by natural pressing methods (dry or wet processing), and when it comes to coconut oil in your beard this is the one that delivers the most benefits, because the natural process keeps most of the active compounds, including the ones that are good for your hair, in the finished oil.
Refined oil is extracted through chemical and physical processes, which strips out many of the oil's compounds. That is why refined oil is mainly used in industrial applications.
Your beard hair
Your beard hair has a tendency to dry out if it doesn't get enough moisture, especially once you've let it grow for a while. Coconut oil in your beard is made for exactly this problem. And it stays a purely plant-based product, with no added chemicals or alcohol, unlike so much of what's on the shelves. Alcohol in particular pulls moisture out; with chemicals, the effect depends on the additive in question.
Coconut oil in your beard supports beard growth
A range of studies, for example one from the National Institutes of Health in 2003, show among other things that using something like coconut oil in your beard as a care product reduces protein loss in the hair. This holds for healthy hair and for hair that is already damaged.
So using coconut oil in your beard heads off damage to the beard hair before it happens, and on balance that means better beard growth.
Coconut oil in your beard: supple and hydrated at once.
Because coconut oil is moisturising without feeling greasy the way other carrier oils do, it's an ideal way to soften up your beard hair. The lauric acid it contains also penetrates your skin more deeply, so it conditions properly at that level too.
As you can see, coconut oil in your beard has real benefits for you and your facial hair, not least because virgin coconut oil is about as complete a product as nature hands you. As the main ingredient in a well-built care product, coconut oil adds a great deal of value as well. If you're looking for the right products, you'll find them as always in our Charlemagne Premium shop.
