The Manual may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site.

Atwater’s new Smooth Target aims to provide complete beard care

Atwater's Smooth Target offers complete beard care

By Bob McCullough Published April 26, 2025

Man putting beard oil on his beard. — Parilov / Shutterstock

Given the explosive growth of men’s beards — both literally and as a product category — many beard companies are expanding their range of offerings, pumping out everything from oils and balms to basic grooming tools like beard combs.

But Atwater is going in a different direction. The company’s new 5-in-1 beard oil, Smooth Target, is designed to be all things to all men when it comes to beard care.

Recommended Videos

Complete beard care in a single package

Atwater beard oil — Atwater

Atwater is touting Smooth Target as the first of its kind when it comes to the complete beard coverage it provides, and the list of what it does is impressive:

Hydration
Beard softening
Exfoliating
Soothing
Fighting odors

Breaking this list down, exfoliating and odor-fighting are the two items you typically won’t see in most beard products. A deeper look reveals an ingredients list of natural oils that are quickly absorbed, with each oil included to perform a specific task.

Apple seed oil: Rich in fatty acids that hydrate and soften skin and beard hairs.
Papaya extract: Works as a natural exfoliator thanks to the rich properties of vitamin C, carotenes, and flavonoids.
Lavender oil: A natural anti-inflammatory that soothes the skin beneath the beard and prevent blemishes from forming.
Rosemary oil: Prevents bacteria from thriving on the skin and leaving an odor behind.

The result is a product designed to promote healthy beard growth, eliminate itchiness, and help manage styling without focusing on a specific scent or fragrance. The pricing is a comfortable $35, so that men don’t have to purchase an array of beard products that typically land in the $10-20 range.

Smooth Target is now available on Atwater’s site, with additional retail availability via Bluemercury, Nordstrom and Amazon.

Topics

Bob McCullough is a freelance author and journalist who has published dozens of novellas and novels, and his journalism has…

Grooming

Beard care for Black men: An expert gives us their top tips

Give your beard the TLC it needs and deserves, and take better care of your facial skin while you're at it

Smiling man with a beard holding a gift box

Whether you are looking for an elegant whisper of facial hair like Mahershala Ali, or the slightly thicker, dapper brush of Idris Elba; the shaggy, soulful scruff of Quest Love, or the luscious, thick styling of James Harden’s bristles, a beard can be a statement of style with immense impact. Those aesthetic grooming choices come with their own struggles, though for most men of African descent, Black skin is prone to ingrown hairs, razor bumps, and even keloids (a scar that can result from scar tissue growing over the wound formed by the ingrown hair).
To get the very best advice we could for beard care for Black men, we checked in with Gillette Barber Council Member Barry Hairston. He is a Dallas-based barber whose clients have included Golden State Warriors guard Steph Curry and Sacramento Kings Center-Forward Tristan Thompson. Hairston has several pro-athlete clients in the Dallas area, including NBA and MLB players.

The professional shave

Grooming

Mushrooms for men’s skincare? Verdoie adds new shroom-based supplement

These two products harness the healing power of mushrooms

Verdoie skincare product

Mushrooms are everywhere. They surround us in the woods when we go for a walk after a heavy spring rain. They’re omnipresent in recipes, both around the world and across the internet. They’ve even turned up in our coffee lately, so it was probably just a matter of time before they appeared in skincare products.
The company to thank for this latest development is a French firm called Verdoie, which just added a supplement called Le Complement Alimentaire to its existing line of mushroom-based moisturizers.

The science behind the shrooms

Grooming

Is too much shower time bad for your skin? What a new study says

This study was conducted on eczema patients, and its good news for them

Relaxed young African-American man takes shower standing under hot water jets in contemporary unit in bathroom close side view

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last couple of years, you’ve probably read or heard a few things about the importance of our skin biome. It’s being compared in importance to our gut bacteria, which many researchers and scientists believe determines the strength of our immune system.
However, the rise of the skin biome has come with several unintended consequences. One is the idea that bathing too frequently or spending too much time in the shower weakens or damages the skin biome, but a recent study suggests that this might not be true at all.

This in-depth study was conducted on eczema patients

The fact that this study was conducted exclusively using eczema patients might seem like a good way to produce idiosyncratic results, but if you look at the details of the study, the struggles these people experience suggests a weaker skin biome that makes them ideal for this kind of test.
The Eczema Bathing Study was designed by people with eczema, together with researchers and healthcare professionals. Subjects were divided into two groups: Those who bathed or showered at least six times a week were classified as “daily bathing,” while those who showered or bathed once or twice a week were designated “weekly bathing.”
These people followed the same routine for four weeks, and they made no changes in their eczema routine, i.e., they used the same moisturizers and other skincare products to counter their condition. The amount of bathing is a vital variable for those struggling with eczema, and there were 438 people in the study, including both adults and children.