Beardoholic Beard Balm, 2oz.

The Beardoholic products all have one central tragic failure, their packaging. The balm itself is a good product, it is yellow in color, and has middle of the road consistency and viscosity. The ingredients are what you would expect, however, the beeswax is the last ingredient which likely explains the natural variation in the texture between all the balms. For Reuzel, it’s the second ingredient, and so it’s a stiffer balm. This product also features an expiration date of about four years from production, something you don’t see in other products.

The scent is described on the packaging as “Sweet Orange,” and the smell is precisely so. The citrus notes are very light and refreshing. The orange isn’t bracing, cutting, or belting but more subtle. Everything about Beardoholic is a pleasure to use, except for the packaging. The first product I bought of theirs was their unscented Beard Oil, and that product came with a crumpled cap on the bottle. This product likewise came from distribution with the tin lid crushed. The packaging is thin enough where you can apply some pressure with your thumb and reform the metal cap at least on the balm. The price of this product is one of the most expensive too, at roughly $20 for 2 ounces. That puts this product at the top of the range, and while the product itself is good, for double the price of the Viking Revolution balms, I would expect more than this. I will continue to enjoy using the Beardoholic balm that I have, but considering the price, I will likely not be a regular consumer.

Beardoholic Unscented Beard Oil 1 oz.

The Beardoholic Unscented Beard Oil, in the 1-ounce bottle, came damaged from Amazon. Beardoholic appears to use aluminum caps on both their bottles and tins and for some reason, the materials always seem to come from the factory bent, warped or buckled. There is little if any scent to discuss about this product, beyond the smell of some of the component oils, which are ever so slightly vegetal or woodsy, if at all.

I started using this beard oil a few times during the day but quickly grew tired of the bottle assembly. It came with an aluminum cap that was buckled from distribution if not from the factory, and so it would never retain a seal. It did not leak, but it also did not fully seat properly. There was an inner plastic dropper-hole cap, with a small plastic plug and after five or six times putting it on and taking it off, it started to warp and ultimately I had to throw the little plug away because it could no longer seal to the dropper-hole it was mated to. After about half of the oil was used, I noticed small spots of leakage, so I resolved to transfer the contents to some other bottle. This created a new comedy of errors and a life lesson on cheap scale problems for consumers. What I wanted was a Boston Bottle, brown glass, with a certain thread count and density. I learned more about bottle choices trying to fix this problem than I ever meant to. As it turns out, you cannot merely order anything like this in one piece increments. You can find lots of people to sell you exactly what you want, a brown-glass Boston Bottle with 20/400 thread with a rubber top and glass pipette. What you can’t find is anyone willing to sell it to you in counts less than 500. So, if you want to fix this one problem, you have to buy 500 glass bottles to fix just one. It’s thoroughly absurd. I have moved away from Beardoholic as a brand, not because of their product, but because of their packaging. It was the first beard oil I tried, and it was a challenge to use. In the end, I did more shopping online and discovered that many other manufacturers use rubber-top/glass-pipette bottles, which I find to be incredibly more pleasant to use. In the end, I ended up at of all places, Hobby Lobby. They were the only ones I could find that had bottles like what I was looking for, and even still, I had to buy a set of three. The cost was almost nothing, but even today, I have two unused bottles in my cupboard that I will likely never ever use since I only needed the one.

I have resolved to use up the Beardoholic Unscented Beard Oil and keep it at work. In a few more days there will be nothing of it left, and I will wash the bottle and store it away as supplies. I don’t think I will be buying any more Beardoholic products, not when their packaging is so weak, or shipping is so strangely rough on them. The quality of the product that I don’t doubt and I do think it a good choice, but only when they address their bent, warped, buckled, and odd options for their products to be shipped in. When your customer has to rebottle your product, that’s not really all that great.