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Much like underwear, offspring or a half-eaten meal at a restaurant, a beard trimmer isn’t the sort of thing you can just return if it’s not to your liking.

Get it wrong and you’re either going to have to fork out for another one or put up and shut up until it eventually stops working, potentially several years down the line.

The sensible thing to do is to go with a highly rated trimmer from a reputable brand. That way, the chances of it being a quality piece of kit that you’ll actually enjoy using are much higher.

Thankfully, Wahl’s stainless steel stubble and beard trimmer is one such machine from a very trusted brand.

With glowing reviews on Amazon and the name of a professional hairstyling institution embossed onto its solid metal body, everything points towards this being the stuff of grooming greatness. But how can you know for sure?

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In order to give you a definitive answer, we put the Wahl stainless steel beard trimmer to the test. We used it for several weeks for everything from sculpting stubble to shaving heads. We cycled through all the different attachments, used it on several different lengths of hair and even let it run completely flat to get an accurate picture of battery life and charging time.

Our criteria were simple. We wanted to see good cutting performance with sufficient power to trim smoothly without pulling hair, the battery had to offer enough runtime for several uses and the attachments had to offer a good spread of possible cutting lengths in order to achieve any desired style. Here’s how the Wahl trimmer fared.

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The first thing that struck us about this trimmer was how solid and robust it feels in hand. It’s got a reassuring weight to it – not uncomfortably heavy, but solid in a way that suggests quality.

We liked how the trimmer felt when using it and preferred it in this sense to rival trimmers in the same price bracket – which are almost exclusively made from plastic and can feel cheap… even if they aren’t.

In the box, there are two plastic bags, one containing short cutting guards for stubble, and the other with longer cutting guards for more substantial facial hair. There are 20 possible lengths in total. Along with the guards, there’s also a small comb, a brush and oil for maintaining the blades, a small carry case with two zip compartments, and a stainless steel stand.

As beard trimmers go, this offers a good selection of attachments. The relatively small jumps in length from one to the next make it easy to achieve fades and transitions in length that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. It allows you to be precise, but the downside is that there are so many of them one or two will inevitably go missing at some stage.

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The attachments are good quality and clip onto the cutting head with a satisfying “snap!”. The stubble combs in particular feel solid but the teeth on some of the longer guides feel a little bit flimsy. That said, it doesn’t affect performance and we didn’t manage to break anything, even when being deliberately hamfisted.

We found the two zip compartments in the carry case handy for organizing the cutting guards. You could separate them into longer and shorter lengths, or, like us, divide them into the ones you use the most and the ones you rarely touch.

There’s nothing worse than a low quality trimmer with insufficient power that nips and tears at hairs. It’s painful, inefficient and sets you up for a bad day. Fortunately, we have no such complaints about the Wahl trimmer. It glides through hair smoothly and is more than powerful enough to deal with even the bushiest of beards.

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One thing we did notice is that it’s particularly fierce when using it without a guard attached. We used it like this to shave our head on one occasion with no issues, but managed to catch the skin on our neck when shaving up to the neckline of our stubble. This isn’t really a complaint, more a warning to proceed with care when going in unguarded.

We’ve all been there: rushing for work, halfway through a spot of fuzz maintenance and the blasted trimmer runs out of battery. With most trimmers, you won’t be able to use it while it’s charging, and that can take anywhere from two hours to no less than 12 hours in some cases.

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This is where the Wahl stainless steel beard and stubble trimmer really shines. It only takes an hour for a full charge, which is quick by anyone’s standards, but if you’re in a real hurry, you can pop it on charge for a minute or so and it’ll give you enough juice to quickly finish the job.

The Wahl stainless steel stubble and beard trimmer is a solid piece of kit at a good price. It’s a capable grooming tool that’s well built, performs excellently and is versatile enough to venture north of the sideburns too. We love the level of precision afforded by the multiple cutting guards and we’re able to achieve the perfect length and transitions in length thanks to the small increments in which they’re sized.

This trimmer’s trump card is its speedy charging time. If, like us, you frequently forget to charge things and often find yourself rushing, you’ll appreciate the quick-charge function and the fact that a full charge takes just an hour from flat.

All in all, this is one of the best trimmers out there in the sub-£100 price bracket. Plus, given that it’s built like a tank it’ll likely last you many years, giving you even more bang for your hard-earned buck.