Beard combs are one of the essential mundane tools for taming and styling your facial hair. They are especially handy when your beard gets longer, as long beards require a bit more effort to smooth, shape, and style. The same goes for thicker or curly facial hair, which is comparatively tougher to smooth out. Beard combs can detangle your thick facial hairs more efficiently and are the best for controlling the shape of your beard. They are also conveniently portable so that you can get quick styling while on the go. Here are our top picks for best-in-class beard combs that are worthy investments.

Augustinus Bader: The Neem Comb (Best Luxury Beard Comb)

As the name suggests, this luxury beard comb is made out of neem wood, widely known for its antifungal and antibacterial properties from ancient times. This water-resistant comb is especially useful for sensitive facial skin and hair. With a super sophisticated look, the wide teeth of the comb help stimulate the hair follicles of your beard. As a result, the hair gets smoothened and detangled quite easily, while the neem wood helps in detoxification too.

The Art of Shaving: Dual-Sided Sandalwood Beard Comb (Best Overall Beard Comb)

Wood beard combs are generally great because they minimize snagging and pulling on coarse beard hair. Wide tooth wooden combs help comb out thick or curly beards more evenly. This dual-sided comb conveniently comes with two different tooth widths for different beard types. Made from Argentinian green sandalwood, this classic beard comb is a bit bulkier in design but is super helpful if you get patches of different thicknesses while your beard grows.

Parker: Premium Rosewood Wide Tooth Beard Comb (Best Small Beard Comb)

Most of the time, larger and bulkier beard combs get hard to control. This anti-static wood comb from Parker is conveniently smaller but highly effective. The wide teeth are shaped more like a pick. The stubbier shape comes with long-sized teeth, offering increased control. This comb also evenly distributes beard products like balms and oils through your facial hair much easier than plastic ones.

Nature Boy: Wooden Beard Comb (Best Beard Comb for Coarse Beards)

Made from black walnut wood and bamboo, this beard comb comes with an innovative finger-hole grip design, providing increased grip. The result is an incredible added control over the motion of your hand, which helps in stimulating blood flow to the follicles. The long, narrowly shaped, and widely spaced teeth of the comb can gently detangle even the curliest and thickest of beards with ultimate ease. The optional fine teeth will work great on shorter beards as well.

Kent: Beard Comb Set (Best Beard Comb Set)

These beard combs from Kent are like the Rolls Royce of beard accessories! With a history of making hair brushes for more than 200 years, their signature handmade combs have gained a cult status symbol among stylish bearded men. Each piece of this set of three is hand polished, saw cut, and buffed to create rounded and soft teeth. With a tortoiseshell finish, these different-sized combs are made of acetate, which promises to cause fewer pulls and snags than plastic.

Major League Baseball has recently enforced the mostly-ignored rule in baseball games. The rule, which prohibits the use of any foreign substances by the pitchers, has been implemented more aggressively than ever. This rule has been in discussion for the last few seasons due to the increasing practice of using sticky adhesives among pitchers to grip the ball better. But on the other hand, experts speculate that enforcing this rule might lead to increased injuries among players.

The Reason Behind the Rule

Pitchers usually mix rosin with sunscreen to increase the friction between the ball and their fingers. This mixture helps them to control the ball, which is otherwise quite slippery. There is another popular sticky adhesive called Spider Tack. It has been found in almost every Major League game, enabling players to do extremely high-speed pitching, and making hitting the ball almost impossible! According to experts, pitching after using Spider Tack is equivalent to going at a speed of 90 mph. That’s why Sports Illustrated recently dubbed the use of these substances one of the biggest scandals in sports.

The Effects of the Rule

The new rule removes all foreign substances from pitching, from the simple sunscreen mix to the more problematic Spider Tack. The league is also encouraging the umpires to check the pitchers frequently, especially for anything sticky that might help the player grip the ball. If found violating the rules, the responsible players would be suspended. While this new rule may effectively reduce the spinning rate of the ball during pitching, making it easier to hit, it may also lead to a possible increase in injuries. According to experts, adapting to a new manual grip while maintaining the quality of pitching will create a reduction in friction. As the players have to change the motion and way of using muscles suddenly, it may cause an increase in arm, elbow, or ligament injuries among pitchers.