My Perfect Goatee Review – A Must have Tool or Just Another Gimmick?
My Perfect Goatee
My Perfect Goatee is a beard shaping tool that is specifically designed for beard growers to shape a great looking goatee with ease and without slip ups that ruin the design.
Pros
It does provide a good end result
Useful for those learning to grow a goatee
Sturdy build and ergonomics
Cons
It is uncomfortable to use
Rollers do not really lock into place
Feels flimsy
This week I had the privilege of trying out a new novelty item for beard maintenance. This item is known as “My Perfect Goatee.”
The My Perfect Goatee is one of the various products I am using and reviewing to help us find the Best Beard Shaping Tools and add them to the roundup comparison page.
It is very often a pain to shave just precisely to keep an even goatee that isn’t lop-sided in one way or another. When attempting to eyeball it, sometimes you take a little too much off one side or the other. Then you need to even it out, and as all too often happens, you end up just having to shave it all off and grow another on
“My Perfect Goatee” aims to help with that, so you won’t have to worry about slipping up with your razor and needing to start over from the beginning.
What Is the Design Like?
Simply put, it is an adjustable template for those of us guys who like to wear a goatee. It fits over the mouth like a guide while you are shaving to block the razor from cutting too deeply into the already present hair.
What makes it very different from most other goatee or beard shapers on the market is that it can be adjusted using rollers in the center to give you a good gauge of how much you want the goatee to extend from your mouth. Most other guides or templates on the market are either a collection of premade guides that end up cluttering your sink or medicine cabinet or are professional guides to be used by another barber cutting your beard.
My Perfect Goatee has three rollers on the center of the unit. As they are turned, they unscrew the side of the guide, making them wider and therefore cover more space. There are issues with these rollers though. They aren’t very tight and don’t really lock in place. Just picking up the unit and grazing the rollers with your fingers is enough to make them turn relatively far. Don’t depend on this thing to “save” your place between shaves.
On the reverse side is a fold out and adjustable mouthpiece that can be moved up and down, though to do so actually feels like you are breaking the thing. The “Food Grade” plastic does feel somewhat flimsy in my hands and makes a loud pop when you are adjusting it up and down.
This is actually a problem for the whole unit really. While the individual parts are solid, the whole piece feels like it’s been thrown together haphazardly on an assembly line somewhere. It feels like a kid’s toy from the mid 90s, in that it just needs some rough handling and it will fall apart.
Overall good concept in design, but wanting in execution.
Performance – Is It Easy To Use and Does it Shape a Goatee Very Well?
This is where we start seeing something of an issue.
It might be somewhat obvious just by looking at the thing, but the idea is for you to hold the unit by the mouth guard, apply your shaving cream, and get to shaving. The Perfect Goatee is designed to be used with all types of razors, so I decided to use it with both a regular cartridge razor and with my safety razor.
When positioning the guide on your face, the top opening sits directly below or even on your nose septum, while the lower portion sits just below your chin. This keeps it straight and makes sure you don’t have it sitting crooked on your face.
From there you just shave around it. Simple enough right?
My issue with this was the fact that it was just uncomfortable. Shaving for me is a comfort activity, and it just felt weird having a piece of plastic shoved in my mouth. Maybe I could get over that after shaving every few days for a month, but for me it was more than a bit unpleasant on the first and second try.
The mouthpiece itself is rather uncomfortable overall, even with it’s padding on the second where you bite down, while the two sides of the guide rub irritatingly on the skin. The edges aren’t sharp, but there is definitely a plastic seam there that will rub while you shave.
My normal process of shaving takes about 5 minutes for a full pass with a razor, and even after only five minutes of shaving it felt like my jaw was going to lock up from biting down on this thing. The experience was not relaxing or easy in the slightest.
The Process of using the cartridge razor was somewhat easier than the safety razor. The cartridge razor has a ⅛ of an inch lip around where the blades are on all sides, so it was easy to just drag the blades to where they would naturally stop. The safety razor though needed to be stopped and turned at various points, making the shave uneven and haphazard.
Because I use a brush and shaving soap, there was a bit to clean after I was done shaving. This plastic was not really easy to get shaving cream off of at all. Every time I tried to rinse it, the soap just seemed like it wanted to stick rather than rinse off. I actually had to scrub portions to get it totally cleaned.
The good news is, because of its plastic and relatively open design, it air dried quite quickly, and I didn’t need to towel it off or worry about corrosion.
Overall the guide did the job it was meant to do, but was a pretty uncomfortable experience.
Not to mention it was pretty hard not to laugh at myself in the mirror because I just looked like some kind of Droid from Star Wars.
What Was The End Result? – How did the goatee look?
At the end of the shaving process, my goatee did look pretty good. The guide itself did exactly what it was designed to do, and kept me from accidentally mangling my goatee. It looked rather good, so there is a redeeming factor in the discomfort of using the product.
Value for Money – It Is Worth Its Price Tag?
Shaving instruments, luxury or purely practical, all come with a price. Such is the way of capitalism really. So when looking at new items to add to my shaving routine, I am often having to weigh the costs.
On Amazon, “My Perfect Goatee” goes for about $24.99 USD. When you add shipping and handling on top of that, you are probably going to be looking at around $30 USD to get it to you. So the big question is whether or not “My Perfect Goatee” is really worth Thirty Dollars to add this to my routine?
Honestly no, I do not think there is a good value to this one.
If I could get this at something like Walmart or Target for something closer to $15 or $20 USD, then it might be something I would try. Honestly though, the experience for me was rather underwhelming and uncomfortable. Even if I did get it over the counter at a discount, this might be an impulse buy that ended up collecting dust on my shelf or in my medicine cabinet.
Final Thoughts and Who is The My Perfect Goatee Best Suited For?
As a part of my Final Thoughts on almost any product I buy, I really do have to ask the question as to whom this item is really for, and if I would recommend it to anyone in particular.
In the case of the Perfect Goatee, I would have to say this product would really appeal to guys who are maybe just starting to grow their goatee and are afraid of messing it up when shaping it. Believe me, when I was younger, that was just what I was. I messed up shaving so many times and just had to deal with a lop-sided beard or just shaving everything off.
Really sculpting a good goatee or van dyke is a skill that can be acquired without the need of a guide. It just takes some practice. Using a guide is sort of like riding a bike with training wheels. Eventually, you are just going to outgrow them.
I feel like the Perfect Goatee is basically the beard equivalent of training wheels. Eventually, you are going to just get used to shaving without it. Though if you need it now, there is no shame in wanting to pick one up if you have the cash.
I would have to say this product is mostly for guys who are learning how to sculpt their beards the way they want, and need a little bit of help dialing in exactly how much they want to shave their beards.
For someone who is used to shaving their facial hair in the way they want without any guides or templates, they may not get very much out of this one.
That price overall also keeps me from recommending it in general unless you can find it on sale from somewhere.
Overall — Bottom Line
“My Perfect Goatee” is a cool idea with a pretty innovative design concept . The product is let down by some fragile feeling construction, cut corners, and just an uncomfortable overall design that makes me think the person who designed it thought of what it could do first rather than how good it would feel to use it.
The price makes it somewhat of a barrier as well. Making it more of a novelty than a must have shaving item.
I would have to give “My Shaving Goatee” 5.4 stars out of 10. Not terrible, and could be helpful in the right hands, but not really a product everyone needs.
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