Cutting your own hair

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’ll second getting the Flowbee. I used to cut my own hair in college, using a pair of hair scissors. For a while after I began working, I went to various inexpensive haircut places, but could never find one that was reliable. We got a flowbee probably twelve years ago now. I use it, and my wife uses it on our kids.

In addition to saving money Vs. having someone cut your hair, the time savings is substantial. I can cut my hair in 15 minutes, start to finish. The vacuum sucks up the hair, so there isn’t hair all over at the end.

22

A couple of notes on this. If you cut your hair with it hanging straight down, the cut will be a fairly sharp line. If you look at this style, you can see she has more jagged edges.

You can buy the scissors which only cut part of the hair. Use the straight scissors to make the bottom cut and then the jagged ones to feather.

Another point is to comb the hair down to where you want it, hold it lightly between your fingers and bring you hand up to where the hair is perpendicular to the face, eg., straight out toward you and then cut a straight in. When the hair comes down the cut will naturally have rounding because the top hair doesn’t come all the way down.

You can also pinch some hair in between your thumb and index finger, and the slide the hair so that they don’t all of the same length. This also contributes to a softer edge.

23

This, except by the time I get grumpy enough to trim my bangs, patience has gone out the window and it usually looks like crap. :stuck_out_tongue:

24

I used to cut my own hair. It was easy, largely because my hair was long – I knew I needed a trim when the ends started getting ratty from me sitting on them all the time. I combed it straight while it was still fairly wet, gathered it tightly together near the end, and pulled it forward under my arm so I could hack at the end with a pair of sharp scissors. It curled enough at the end that as long as I got it all to the same length, plus or minus about half an inch, it looked like I’d cut it straight across. Can’t do that anymore; it’s much wavier now that I live in a damp place, and I had a hairdresser layer the ends not too long ago. I find your $10 haircuts hilarious, because my very simple request cost me $50, plus tip, and not at a particularly fancy place.

My father once discovered he could give himself a buzzcut with a set of regulation dog clippers. I think my mother let him get away with it for a month or two before she put her foot down and sent him back to Supercuts.

Only cut your own hair if you have a good enough sense of humor – and own enough hats – to think it’s funny when you fail. Otherwise, cough up the dough for someone else to do it.

25

I’ve been cutting my hair myself for a couple of years now. I use a pair of thinning shears so that the edges are soft instead of blunt. It’s easy cause I keep my hair in a short fauxhawk like style. Current pic taken just now.

26

Philips Hair Clipper

Setting number one around the ears and to taper the back, number 2 for everywhere else. Remove the comb and use it to trim the stray hairs. Takes less than 10 minutes and none of the fiddly bits that end up getting lost that the other clippers come with.
I don’t even use a mirror anymore.

27

I cut it myself in the bathroom, using clippers and a hand mirror. Super short buzz cut, I buzz the sides and back to skin level, leave about 1/4" on top and blend the transition line a little.
I have a tile floor in the bathroom, clean up with a broom and shop vac.

28

:dubious: Maybe you need a new user name then…

:stuck_out_tongue:

29

That’s what happens when you devote about .01 of a second to choosing a username.

:smiley:

30

I cut my own hair, but it took a few bad haircuts before I got it down. You could shave it all off, and just beg your wife to do the neckline(the hardest part, imo).

I do it because I have hated literally every person who has cut my hair professionally. If they would just shut up, they’d get a good tip and a return customer. Also, I’m cheap.

31

I did it for many years through darkness and poverty. Kept it extremely short. Now that I’m making decent money again, I’ve been letting it grow out and getting normal haircuts. Kinda odd getting used to needing a comb again.

32

I’d like to point out that, while I *do *cut my own hair, and I AM a cheap bastard, I don’t primarily do it to save money. I do it to save time. The time wasted *going *to the Supercuts, waiting your turn, getting the cut, and getting back home, is FAR more of a waste than the twelve bucks plus fifty cent tip that it costs me monetarily…

33

But the mad scientist look is cool! Just look at Professor Poliakoff!

34

Yes I cut my own hair, and have been for 30 years.
The last time someone else cut my hair I was in high school, and I let a cousin cut it for me. That debacle let to me having to go BALD until it grew back, which for an 18 y.o. in 1981 was unheard of! After it grew back I borrowed a set of electric clippers and tried cutting it myself, standing in the bathroom with my back to the medicine cabinet mirror, while holding a hand mirror in my left hand, and the clippers in my right. It took a bit of practice to get the hand movements right to be able to see and cut all around my head, but with the 1" attachment over the blades I wasn’t worried about messing it up. I bought my first clippers a couple of years later after joining the Army, and have been cutting it on average about every two weeks. I’ve since added several other “guards” (as we call the attachments) to my typical haircut using 3/8" on the top, the really low “Blending” guard on the back & sides, and the “Left/Right Taper” guards to fade them together.

You can see my results here: Slaughter

Over the years though I’ve learned 2 very important lessons:

  1. Never cut your hair if you’ve been drinking! (Kinda self-explanatory)
  2. Make sure your equipment is in good condition! (I once had a cracked guard fall off the clippers resulting in a shaved path on the top my head. That was the second time I had to unwillingly go bald!)
35

I spent most of my life going to old fashioned barbers and paying the $5-$8 for them to (mostly) screw it up every month, month in and month out, without fail. No matter what, or who I went to, I would do the same routine:

  1. Show up in tiny barbershop without enough chairs, listening for forty-five minutes while the barber wines and dines some boring old geezer with three surviving hairs on his head. Both the barber and the geezer would go on about politics or current events, or local sports, or something else that I simply could not tolerate. I’d try to be charming and smile or occasionally throw in something agreeable as the conversation endured, but I am just not a small talk kind of person. The mandatory barbershop stack of National Geographic magazines and the daily newspaper were all that kept me alive during this wait.

  2. Finally, as my turn came around, I would sit in the barber’s chair and receive my cut. There’d be conversation, though not all of them went as badly as I described in Step 1. Either way, I would receive my cut and it would look just fine in the mirror, and the barber would throw on a little cologne or some spray-on crap, and I’d mosey on, feeling and smelling like a million bucks. One shower later, and the hair was unmanageable for the hairstyle that I was trying to maintain. I always get the same simple box style haircut, and comb my hair the exact same way. Still, nobody could get it right, so I just got fed up with the odd angles the barbers would come up with as they would trim my hair. It just never looked right.

So after getting tired of forking over $8 a month and enduring a wait in the barbershop chairs longer than I liked, I bought myself a $15 pair of clippers at Dollar General and have been cutting my own hair for the past 7 or 8 months. I haven’t had one bad haircut yet, because I know exactly what I’m going for, and how to accomplish that look. Plus if I finish up and find out later that I missed something, or even left one of those odd angles myself, or didn’t cut enough here or there . . . I can fix it in no time. No more grinning and bearing it. It doesn’t take very long to do it either. I am kinda obsessive-compulsive, so I probably linger and re-cut more than I need to, but I still tend to get my hair the way I want it in about twenty minutes. Never have to leave the house, don’t have to pay anybody. I sweep up, dust myself off, and go back to my business.

It helps to have a hand mirror so you can cut the back more easily, but I personally just use the bathroom mirror and use my hand to judge. Your intuition is pretty good at telling you when you are screwing everything up, and a good sense of touch is more than enough to tell if the hair is short enough or uneven in different places. Once you get the hang of it, it’s really easy. I use a razorblade to even out the back of my neck, but then I like things perfect. I am always complimented on how well I cut my hair when people find out that I do it myself. They always say that it looks like I took it to the barber (I suppose given my experience with barbers, I could take that as an insult, but I don’t lol) and that it’s really even. I’m always asked to trim children’s hair and stuff like that.

My opinion is that you should totally go get your clippers, your comb and your scissors and take care of business. If you make any mistakes, big deal, just go with a Marine cut until the hair grows back. You learn by doing, and as long as you are careful, you shouldn’t make any really embarrassing mistakes. It’s so easy! Just take your time and get comfortable doing it. Make sure you have mineral oil or some similar oil for your blades so that your clippers will cut properly, and oil the blades frequently. I usually oil them every time I cut my hair, since it doesn’t require a lot of oil and the typical bottle of mineral oil is pretty much a lifetime supply.

Anyway, I wish you luck with your do-it-yourself cut. Let us know if you succeed!

Panzram

36

I’ve been doing it for years now. Not much to say about it, so I’ll just run through the major points:

  • It helps a lot that I’ve never needed a particular style. Just keep it short and even. It started dawning on me that the Chinatown stylist wasn’t worth it when 90% of the job was running essentially an electric shaver over my head. Got a hair trimmer from Sears and never looked back.

  • The important things are to take my time and be thorough. Pulling a trimmer through a thick head of hair too fast hurts a lot, and it’s very easy to miss certain spots (around the ears is particularly troublesome).

  • Sight and touch are both very important for judging how far I have to go. I’ve never been any good with multiple mirrors, so being able to feel out a half inch or a quarter inch is a required skill.

  • For cleanup, the simpler, the better. I do it in the bathroom, so I can just let the hair fall on the floor and then sweep it up. I’d never do it in the shower; serious risk of clogging, especially with the kind of hair I have.

Hey, never having to fight traffic to Chinatown again, never having to find parking in Chinatown, not having to pay $12 plus tip every time, not having to pay about twice that much from a corporate outlet, being able to do it any time I want…I’d say it’s worth it.

37

Been cutting my own hair for years. It’s been thinning since my 20s so at some point I just decided to embrace it and buzz it short. Started at 1/2" and now I use a 1/16" guide. I go over it each weekend to keep it neat, takes a few minutes. I just lean my head over the bathroom sink. Brush most of the hair out into the garbage can, rinse the strays down the drain and take a quick shower - I can actually shampoo my head in the sink with a little soap and water, dry it with a towel and be done. Handy at work sometimes!

Feels good, looks neat, extremely low maintenance. I’m not bald, I’m aerodynamic :smiley:

As far as keeping the back neat, it’s surprisingly easy to do with my razor when I shave my face, I can keep the neckline even by feel and it only takes a minute to do in the shower.

38

It would be helpful to know how many self hair cutters here are men vs women. Men’s hair doesn’t seem as hard to do, or as critically observed to me, though I admit I could be off base.

39

I just gave myself an all over trim; I was blessed* with wavy hair that hides any weirdness that might happen when I’m cutting it myself. The funny thing about the haircuts I give myself is that they are exactly the way I want it - I don’t know why I can’t get a decent layered cut from a hair stylist (although it’s probably because I go to cheap places).

*For some values of blessed. Remember when it was in style to have the ends of your hair flipping up? Mine has done that all my life. :slight_smile:

40

About every three years or so, I go from a short haircut that requires regular trips to the hairdresser to growing my hair long.

The very reason is that I can not find a hairdresser who will actually do what I tell them. I have wavy hair and it will not obey so you need to cut it a certain way or I look like a doofus.

Anyway, once it is grown out (we are at the inbetween stage now), I just cut it myself. It has a mind of it’s own anyway so I just cut it the way I think it should look and I cut it when it is dry (so all those waves are there.

Still, I know there will be yet another hot day in summer when I decide to just cut it all off again <sigh>