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The Faces of Beardsgaard • Alfheim

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Beardsgaard may be a barbershop in Batavia, here in the mortal plane, but it is also the fantasy world. In that world is an apothecary, River Peak Apothecary, that makes magic potions scented by the seasons, their scents evoking the places you will find all over the Realm.

This is Alfheim, from our 9 Realms of candles collection, smelling of the land of the Day Elves, where a pair of herbalist Dawn Elf siblings learn a timeless lesson on why you should never go with an Unseelie to a second location in the Faewild.

Taking this photo shoot to Chicago on a lovely Sunday meant that there were swarms of people everywhere to be edited out of shots. Despite the crowding, the immediate sibling-like connection between our models carried the day and we had a hoot of a day illustrating our most Elvish-smelling candle.

Dive into the magic of Alfheim with us.

COSTUMING: Local theater costumer All Dressed Up Costumes, Grimfrost, and pieces from the Beardsgaards’ personal closet.
LOCATION: ALFRED CALDWELL LILY POOL, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
MODELS: Tanya & Randy

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The Faces of Beardsgaard • Niflheim

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Beardsgaard may be a barbershop in Batavia, here in the mortal plane, but it is also the fantasy world. In that world is an apothecary, River Peak Apothecary, that makes magic potions scented by the seasons, their scents evoking the places you will find all over the Realm.

This is Niflheim, from our 9 Realms of candles collection, smelling of the land of the Water Elementals, where a Mist Spirit undertakes an epic journey to become the champion of Niflheim, on a very inopportune year.

We got up well before dawn this day to take one of the former barbers of Beardsgaard to an adorable little waterfall in a local forest preserve and create one of our most difficult fantasy settings for our freshest smelling candle.

Dive into the magic of Niflheim with us.

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The Faces of Beardsgaard • Spiritbrook IRL {Video}

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The faces of Beardsgaard series takes you inside the story and the world of each of our products ~ our real live regular clients, cut by the Beardsgaard barbers, groomed by River Peak Apothecary, and on location, often just off the beaten path. Journey to our realm, nerds.

Photos: Left: Natalie Anderson / Right: Jim Richards

We often say that Beardsgaard is the D&D game to River Peak’s LARP tournament, and that is demonstrated nowhere as fully as these fantastical photo shoots we do sometimes.

So while everything is magical and polished over at River Peak Apothecary, at Beardsgaard we get down and, in many cases, pretty dirty. Or at least Blademaiden did this time, skittering up trees and tossing herself in the dirt at every opportunity to get the good angles with the camera.

Photos: Lindsey Roussel

Let us tell you the rest of the story, and get to the bottom of the post for the full video.

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The Faces of Beardsgaard • Fjordmist IRL

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The faces of Beardsgaard series takes you inside the story and the world of each of our products ~ our real live regular clients, cut by the Beardsgaard barbers, groomed by River Peak Apothecary, and on location, often  just off the beaten path. Journey to our realm, nerds.

We often say that Beardsgaard is the D&D game to River Peak’s LARP tournament, and that is demonstrated nowhere as fully as these fantastical photo shoots we do sometimes.

So while everything is magical and polished over at River Peak Apothecary, at Beardsgaard we get down and, in this case, literally really dirty, tromping around the woods before the sun was even all the way up, because we’re crazy people, we guess.

Let us tell you the rest of the story, and get to the bottom of the post for the full video.

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The Faces of Beardsgaard • Frostwood IRL {Video}

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 The faces of Beardsgaard series takes you inside the story and the world of each of our products ~ our real live regular clients, cut by the Beardsgaard barbers, groomed by River Peak Apothecary, on location, dressed by stellar clothing brands or fashionably cosplayed. Journey to our realm, nerds.
Real life on the left, full- fantasy on the right

We often say that Beardsgaard is the D&D game to River Peak’s LARP tournament, and that is demonstrated nowehere as fully as these fantastical photo shoots we do sometimes. Usually it’s just Blademaiden, sometimes Beardsmith helping, and one of our clients in front of the camera. Sometimes on location. Once with a horse and horse wrangler.

This time we brought a mini crew, Shopkeep Vinc video documenting, upstairs neighbor Jimmy taking his own photo set on his giant, fancy Mamiya RZ67 ProII (his photos are the on-location images featured in this post, check out more about him at the bottom of the post), and Blademaiden trying to capture on film the written mythology of Frostwood (which you can descend into right here.)

We began the mythological photo shoots with autumn and Hearthstone, but when we set out to bring the inspiration behind Frostwood to life, (our winter beard oil from the house-made line of Beardsgaard), everything seemed to be conspiring against us. Let us tell you the rest of the story.

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The Faces of Beardsgaard • Hearthstone IRL

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 The faces of Beardsgaard series takes you inside the story and the world of each of our products ~ our real live regular clients, cut by the Beardsgaard barbers, groomed by River Peak Apothecary, on location, dressed by stellar clothing brands. Journey to our realm, nerds.
Faces of Beardsgaard ~ Hearthstone

When we set out to bring the inspiration behind Hearthstone to life, (our autumn beard oil from the house-made line of Beardsgaard) we knew we were setting off on an adventure the likes we have never undertaken before.

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By the Hair of the Peaky Blinders

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Peaky Blinders is a visual masterpiece of a TV show set in Birmingham, England in 1919, one of the always stellar Netflix Originals. The Blinders are a bunch of war vets turned sort of businessmen but mostly gangsters who get their name from their habit of sewing razor blades into their hat brims for easy blinding in a fight. Which they get in often.

The haircuts have become a bit of a thing lately, because they’re both tough and classic, sharp and low maintenance, easy going and aggressive. A few are more refined, but still easy as can be to wear. Explore the world of unauthorized Blinder hair, cut and photographed by superfans.

Industrie Online is a hair industry online magazine (as the name would imply) that does some truly inspired work. They are also good friends of the shop. So when they came to us for Peaky Blinders haircut photos for a story, a hell of a ball started rolling, and it hit the bottom of the hill within one week, crashing into 12 models, 6 characters and 36 photos at the bottom.

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By Way of Beardsgaard / Gandalf IRL

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Before River Peak Apothecary, Beardsgaard made some beard friends with the fellows at Merlin’s Beard. We liked the cut of our collective jibs, so we made some beard stuff together in a trilogy of scents: Odin, Gandalf and Claus named after the epic beards of vikings, wizards and Santa.

We built scents off of characters and ideas. Might as well make them In Real Life. And soon, Brian the Shop Artist will be illustrating these scenes in even more awesome detail. 

20151019-024-Gandalf IRL-Beau Cheval Farm

Gandalf was a slightly more difficult model search than Odin. Big white beards aren’t too hard to find around here, but our wizard needed a truly epic one. We weren’t too hopeful in finding that in a dude who also had long, flowing white hair (not a lot of that among our clientele), but that’s what the wizard hood is for.

Kevin fit the bill wonderfully. He takes better care of his beard than even Beardsmith, and he is a huge animal lover. Which is good, because for this shoot we got a damn horse, which added quite the extra level of difficulty to the festivities.

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By Way of Beardsgaard / Odin IRL

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Before River Peak Apothecary, Beardsgaard made some beard friends with the fellows at Merlin’s Beard. We liked the cut of our collective jibs, so we made some beard stuff together in a trilogy of scents: Odin (get it here), Gandalf and Claus named after the epic beards of vikings, wizards and Santa.

We built scents off of characters and ideas. Might as well make them In Real Life. And soon, Brian the Shop Artist will be illustrating these scenes in even more awesome detail. 

20150921-009-Odin IRL Shoot-Batavia Riverwalk

When we needed to find ourselves an Odin, there was no other client in our minds except Jason. He just happens to look a crazy amount like Travis Fimmel, otherwise known as Ragnar Lodbrok on the History Channel show Vikings. A perfect fit.

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