Beard Trimmers: Philps Norelco Bodygroom versus Wahl Peanut

Not long ago I asked the Forum for beard trimmers, gadgetry into which I hoped to enter the fullness of ownership. Two names came to my attention: the Wahl Peanut and the Philips Norelco Bodygroom. (The former had three recommendation, while the latter had only one; still, as the proprietor of a web site for men, I felt I had a duty to check it out.)

Before I get into any detail, let’s get this out of the way: For trimming a beard, the Wahl Peanut is clearly the better tool. Despite its antiquated design—it has a power cord; can you imagine?—it was far superior for the task at hand.

Neither tool is expressly designed for beards, missing especially a hatch into which bits of beard can be caught. Both vary their cutting depth by means of clip-on plastic guards and feature a single speed setting.

When it came to hair, the Peanut just murdered my beard… in a good way. Moving the Peanut through my crop—styled in a hybrid of my own creation that combines the best features of Wolverine, Lemmy Kilmister, and Magnum, P.I.—made short work of my beard. Its cutting tip, sans guards, made it almost too easy to make clean borders; I nearly trimmed it too far, entranced by its effortless ability to whack away my whiskers.

The Bodygroom, on the other hand, didn’t fare quite as well. Its cutting blade—using the same metal-over-metal design of the Peanut and pretty much every other trimmer out there—is made of stamped metal. Whether it was the thinner metal, blade design, or battery-constrained torque, the Bodygroom took a slower hand to prevent painfully grabbed-but-not-cut hairs. It worked, though—you could definitely trim a beard with it should you have no better option.

The great disappointment of the Bodygroom was its electric razor [seen disassembled here]. Flanked on either side by the trimming blades, the razor is supposed to take the just-clipped stubble down to the skin. It works well enough on the body—I now have an inch-and-a-half strip of bare skin on my chest—but on the beardless portion of my face it was completely worthless. I had hoped that I might be able to trim my beard with the Bodygroom’s guards on, then remove them to shave down to the skin elsewhere—that was not to be.

I’ll be sending the Bodygroom back to Amazon, as I have absolutely no desire to trim to the skin anything south of my neck. If I were a Greco-Roman wrestler or a fastidious OCD sufferer I would consider it; it does take off body hair in one pass (although slight stubble will still remain). But for my beard—and should I find scissors insufficient, my nethers—the Wahl brings the sort of hand-numbing torque necessary to keep my arboreal regions clearly away from my poles.