Understanding everything there is to know about men’s grooming tools can often be a bit more difficult than one would initially anticipate. There’s a vast array of tools and products available to guys to help them look and feel as good as possible, but one question remains as one of the most frequently asked questions when guys are shopping for a grooming tool — What’s the difference between a beard trimmer and electric shaver?
Guys around the world have been asking this question for years, and while you’d expect there to be a clear answer by now, there isn’t. A quick search online will show plenty of fellas still confused about the difference between these two very unique items, and our goal is to finally clear up this confusion.
Knowing how to differentiate between a beard trimmer and electric shaver will benefit you greatly going down the road when you go to buy or recommend new grooming products for yourself or a friend, so without any further delay, here is the main difference between a beard trimmer and electric shaver.
1. Beard Trimmers Are Used To Tidy Up Hair
One of the easiest ways to tell the difference between a beard trimmer and an electric shaver is by understanding what the purpose of a beard trimmer actually is.
As the name would suggest, the main goal of a beard trimmer is not to completely get rid of hair. Instead, a beard trimmer is used to clean or tidy up existing hairs on your face. I recommend that you read my article on the top beard trimmers by clicking here.
While there are certainly situations in which you’ll want to completely get rid of certain areas of hair, there do come other situations in which you’d like to tidy things up. Maybe you don’t like the shape of your beard at the moment and want to give it a new look/style?
This is where a trimmer would come into play.
Shavers are nice for when you want to completely omit parts of your hair (be it on your head or your face), but trimmers are only really used for working on the finer details. Many guys to this day still purchase trimmers with the expectation that they’ll be able to get rid of huge chunks of hair, but this simply is not the case.
This first tip might seem a bit obvious to some of you, but we’re reiterating it for a reason. The simplest points are often overlooked, and we want to make sure we don’t do that here.
2. You Aren’t Required To Use Gel Or Cream When Using An Electric Shaver
When working with an electric shaver, lots of guys are under the impression that you’re required to use a cream or gel with it. However, this is false.
Because of how powerful electric shavers typically are, the presence of a gel or cream while shaving your face just isn’t necessary. To see the electric shavers that I recommend, read my shaver article by clicking here.
Although this isn’t exactly the best way to tell a trimmer and shaver apart, it is important to keep in mind as it does give you a better understanding of what an electric shaver is and what it’s truly capable of. This is something that has tricked up some guys when trying to tell the difference between the two, so we figured we’d go ahead and mention it just to make sure we had all of our bases covered.
3. Electric Shavers Typically Have Much Larger Blades And More Powerful Motors Than Trimmers
Which brings us to our third point. When looking at trimmers and shavers side by side, you’ll typically be able to notice a difference in the way that the two products look. Since shavers are designed to remove larger areas of hair when used, they often have much larger blades a bigger body to accommodate a more capable motor.
On the other hand, trimmers benefit from being able to have smaller and more compact bodies. The blades for trimmers are also usually a bit on the smaller side of things, and when you consider what these two products are made to be used for, this all makes rather good sense.
If you’re using a tool to eliminate whole patches of hair, you quite obviously need a bigger motor and larger blades. If you won’t want to detail parts of your hair, and just clean up certain parts of your beard, mustache, etc., you can get away with a tool that’s a lot more compact and easy to handle.
You will occasionally come across a trimmer that’s larger than a shaver, or a shaver that’s smaller than a trimmer, but these are usually only a few tiny exceptions to the rule we just went over. New designs are constantly being introduced for these sorts of gadgets, but for the most part, you can rely on trimmers being smaller and shavers being on the larger side of things.
4. Both Trimmers And Shavers Can Either Be Corded Or Cordless
Something that some people often get confused about is the pretense and/or absence of cords with trimmers and shavers. There are guys that are under the impression that electric shavers are always corded, but this is simply not true.
Both shavers and trimmers can be made either with or without a cord attached to it, as this is all entirely left up to the company that created it. Shavers will sometimes have a longer and more heavy duty cord due to the more powerful nature of what they’re capable of, but this is not a very efficient or practical way to try and tell the difference between the two different styles of grooming tools.
Final Thoughts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O111kDiI3rY
Wrapping all of this up, we hope that we’ve made it a bit easier for you to distinguish between electric shavers and beard trimmers. Each of these products is made to offer a very different and specific function, and hopefully you’re more aware of this after reading through this guide. The differences between shavers and trimmers might not be entirely obvious at first, but after a bit of careful looking and searching around, it’s clear that it’s not too difficult after all.
