How to Cut, Blend, and Texturize Men's Hair: Step-by-Step Clipper & Scissor Tutorial

This is the haircut that you'll learn in this tutorial. I'll walk you through all the clipper techniques that I use, as well as mistakes that you could make, and how you can overcome some problems. And you'll find a good mix of scissor cutting and clipper work for you to learn. So this is what we're starting with. Let's dive in straight with the number three. Now what I'm going to do is go in right at the very base of the hairline and work my way up off the head. I do this in many tutorials. What I'm looking for is the ridge that goes around the head, where the head sticks out the most at the side and at the back. So I keep the clipper completely flat on the head, and when I hit that ridge, I just carry on gliding straight up. And this is going to do most of the blending in work for you. So right about there, straight up through the parietal ridge. That's what we call it, the parietal ridge. And at the back, it's the occipital ridge. But that's not important. All we need to know is where does the head stick out the most? At the side here. Again, just working straight up off the head. Don't be tempted to go round over the head with the clipper, because that's going to take too much weight away. When I go around the ear, you'll notice that I keep one side of the clipper off the head. So the guard is only touching around the ear and not further up. And being careful not to obliterate that longer hair higher up. We need to scissor cut that. I'm going to teach you how to do that in this tutorial. But for now, I'm going to get this nice and clean, straight up off the side of the head. What I'm doing here is I'm using my comb as almost like a guide. So I'm aiming for the comb. That's a method you can use if you feel it makes you more comfortable. Just at the bottom of the neck, the hair is growing sideways. So let's go against that. This is going against the grain. We call these nape whorls. That's the technical name for a nape whorl. But just go against the direction that the hair is flowing and you'll get it down to the length that you want. It is an area that commonly gets missed because it's quite short after the clipper has gone over it. But if you want your haircut to be really neat, make sure you do those nape whorls. Go against the grain. Again, look, I'm keeping one side of the guard off the head around that ridge so I don't get too close. Now this is me going down to a number two, which is just six millimetres. And I'm just going to go around the edge here, just the perimeter to take it slightly shorter. So just touching the bottom and then flicking the clipper out a little bit around the edges. That's all we need to do. These colourful guards, by the way, I got them from Hairpoon. So I'll leave a link for them down below if you're looking for some colourful guards for your clipper. And just this area again, I kind of combed against that there and then I'm just going to work my way up on that nape whorl very carefully around the edges. Now a lot of this work here I do with the little trimmer, so I'm not going to spend a long time. I think you can be more accurate with the little trimmer. I'll show you what I'm going to do with that in just a moment. So with the trimmer, I'm going to take the fluff off the face first and then tease this hair out with the comb, just teasing it out and lifting it up so that I can run over the comb. The comb acts as a guard as well around the ear. I don't want to go like too high into the hairline, just on the very edge of the hairline because it can look quite unusual. I've said that in a lot of videos, we don't want to make a mud guard. At the back, just go straight down, don't follow around the hairline, just straight down the back, make a straight line. Same on this side, nice and straight. Now it doesn't pop too much on the blonde hair, it doesn't frame up quite as well as it would on dark hair, but it's more forgiving on blonde hair. So I'm taking all the fluff off up to the neckline and then I'm just going to pull that down again with the comb, just pulling the teeth down to the edge of the hairline. See there's a slight ridge there, I'm going to get rid of that with a half. So move the open blade just to the half position and just brush into the hair with that. That'll get rid of that little ridge. So it's time to start cutting the top with scissors and this is going to be fun. If you haven't done any scissor cutting, you'll learn a lot here and a simple method. I always like to cut on wet hair and I'm going to use my Japanese steel blade Donia scissor, which you can get from my online shop. It's a seven inch Japanese steel. So what I'm going to make is a profile guide. I'm going to lift a line of hair up right down the middle, slightly longer at the front and this will be my guide for cutting the top. So I've got this section enough that I can hold in the comb, not too much more than that. And I'm going to cut all the way across from the front to the back, all about the same length. And look how many times I comb it out. One, two, three. I like to smooth my section right out. I'll show you later a little mistake that I make and actually how to rectify it later on in the haircut. But one, two, three. That's how many times I'm combing the section out to make sure it's smooth. I want my guide at the very least to be accurate. So working my way over the crown, because this is quite long, we don't need to worry too much about the crown. So now we can cut down this profile guide. So we'll make these sections wider, make the profile guide wider. Using the hook of the comb, I'm going to draw my section, get the teeth right in at the root and pick my section up. Now I can see that there's some short hair in the middle. That's my guide and I'll just cut across to that. So that way I know I've got the correct length. There's my guide again. I'll just match up to that once again. So this is keeping us right. It's basically making that profile guide much wider. Now here's the mistake. Look, I've not got my teeth right in at the root here. So my section isn't perfect. Even though I'm combing out, I haven't combed it right out from the root. And I do this a few times here. You see the teeth aren't just right in at the root and that's what you want. You want to get nice and clean. Okay. So I'm a little bit above the root and I'm going to show you later on how I repair this, how I fix it. And you can actually see the little mistakes because of that, but we'll fix it. So leave the fringe just now. Let's step over to the left-hand side and same thing again. I'll take a bunch of sections, lift them up and what we should get is in the middle, we should be able to find the short hair from that profile guide that we made wider. There it is. So I'll lift up to there. That's my new guide for the sides and cut across. Working from the back to the front once again. Now you don't have to work as fast as I'm working. Work at your own speed. But the main thing is you have a methodology and this is the main methodology right here. Let me know what size of scissor you're using, by the way, because the seven inch, you can see it really removes a huge amount. It actually becomes more important when you're cutting the sides. I think using the seven inch, especially doing scissor over comb, which I'm going to teach you in this lesson. But I do also sell a six inch on my online shop. So take a look. I'll tag both in this video and you can see what you think. On the other side, I won't show you the diagram this time. Basically, we're looking for that short hair from the middle. So this is on the right-hand side and I'm going to work my way forward from there. So I'm lifting up quite high. I'm not like pulling out to the side because I don't want to remove the length from the side. There's going to be, I need that length there for the blending in technique that I want to show you. My sections are a bit cleaner now. So listen, I'm still going to show you how to fix this, how to fix that silliness, that rushing that I was doing earlier down the middle. Let's jump over to the side now. And what we need to do is let's get the fringe out of the way. I want to deal with that separately. So just figure out where, you know, where the, from the recession point, pull that out of the way. And then the hair on the side, we'll pull that straight down and we're going to cut in sections from the top to the bottom. I'll explain that in a minute. So scissor goes in, comb underneath, comb it out and then pull it down to around about the ridge. I'm going to leave this line here so that we can see where the hair falls. It's just falling right on that line. That's where I want it to be. Okay. So after you've cut it, you need to think when the hair falls, it wants to sit right on this line here. There's a little bit of scissor over comb going through up through the hair. I'll talk about that in a minute, but picking up high up, working your way down to that line. And that's where we want it sitting. So just visualize that. Don't worry about how fast I'm going here. You can go much slower if you want. On the fringe, I'm going to basically aim for the corner of the eyebrow up into my kind of ridge that I made there. Now let me explain working from the top to the bottom. The reason I do it from the top down and not from the bottom up is because if you work from the bottom up, you're working into long hair that's hanging on top of your section. So if you, if you take your top section first, you're only dealing with that. Okay. And then you pick up a little bit more fresh hair and there's nothing lying on top of it that you need to cut. So, you know, working from the bottom up, it just means that you're chomping through way more hair than you need to. This is allowing me to just isolate smaller amounts and I can work my way down. And here I'm just looking to leave it right on that occipital ridge at the back. Occipital ridge, because it is the occipital bone, which is that bone that sticks out at the back. So, so important in the world of barbering and head shape and everything. You need to know what these, well, you don't need to know what these bones are called, but that's what it's called. And it plays a massive role in the head shape of every haircut. We're always looking for balance. And I think if you think about the crown as the fat end of an egg. So this point on the top of the head that we're looking at, you know, where the head spreads out from, that would be the fat end of an egg. And the chin would be the pointy end of an egg. Now imagine if you're looking at a head, that would be roughly the shape that you want to create. If you just visualize that kind of egg shape and that would give you a really balanced commercial look. So that's a little bit of insight into why you would leave the hair around the ridges. Let's step over to the side here, pull the fringe out of the way again. There we go. We want to deal with the fringe separately from the rest. So in quite high up and think about where it's going to lay right around the parietal ridge on this side. This is the parietal bone. The parietal bone is a big bone that goes right over the top of the head. But this is the where it sticks out the most on this ridge. Now this technique of scissor over comb, I'm only really taking dust off. So when you do something like that, the comb and the scissor work together going up the way, just taking absolute dust. You don't really want to be taking like big chunks out using that technique. So pull all that down. Still a little bit heavy there, but I'm going to show you another technique to break that up later as well. We're going to slice it. So double check to make sure that this is nice and smooth, this scissor work here. And then scissor over comb. You can see how it's just like the shrapnel coming off. It's like tiny bits of dust. That's all you want with this technique, but I'm going to have to polish this haircut later. So there's going to be more. Now when it's wet and dry like this, it looks like it's not blended in because the wet hair lays really flat and the dry hair stands on end. But when it's all dry, it's much more blended in. We'll come back to that in a minute. Let's get this fringe tied in and then I'm going to slice through the hair a little bit. So what is slicing? Slicing is a way of separating or dividing or creating direction or texture where you just bring the scissor through a section, but don't close it. Just slide it towards the end and what it's going to do is going to take the spine. It's going to break the body of the hair and allow it to separate and it will cause it to flow in the direction that you're slicing as well. So a little bit of slicing here. I just felt like on this side it needed it because it was too bulky, too bold. You can get carried away slicing through hair by the way. It is only possible using a convex blade. You can't really slice with a bevel scissor like a cheaper scissor. It needs to be like a razor. So on the front, I'm going to cut about the bridge of the nose and that should leave the hair around about on the eyebrow. So let's pick up and I'm just going to take my profile section there just to the very end again. I'm just going to take like a little bit off the front there because what I want to do is I want to balance all the hair just on my comb and then cut across the comb. Probably about five or six sections across the front spread out and then we can pull it all down onto the bridge of the nose and just chip. There shouldn't be much then you know. It's just chipping across the very ends then. It's not too heavy there. Just balance it on the comb. I don't want to put tension on it because if I pull it straight and then cut on the bridge of the nose, it's going to spring back a little bit. I'm leaving it without tension and I'm just cutting it loose. You can cut with tension. If you cut with tension on curly hair that's definitely going to recoil much higher on the head. So let me now fix my mistakes. This is called cross-checking. So what I'm going to do is lift up the hair in like profile sections again all over. Just lift it up and what I want to do is cut across the sections that I took on the top and I'm looking for any long hair that's sticking up with my cross-check. And at the front you know remember I got a little bit rough at the front. I will find little mistakes there. You're going to see. Look there that's disconnected. So let's sort that out. That could look like a scissor mark on straight hair especially. Now look at the back here. This isn't blended in here. So I need to go over this with the scissor and what I do is I just keep the thumb moving and I move the comb and the scissor up through the hair together so they they work parallel to each other and you just work up taking absolute dust. You can see it just kind of flying around there. Don't be too hard. Don't chunk in and don't take single cuts. You need to keep the scissor and the comb moving. Scissor has to move. It's like an extension of the clipper really. You're just working your way up through there. It'll make it kind of uniform but what I'm trying to do is just smooth over these lines. Just smooth them over. Keep it all moving as one. There's another little line there. Let's just work our way through that. If you find that you're creating problems you know you're creating lines with this technique it's because you're chomping in too hard or you're only taking single cuts. Now this is a little bit like slicing. This is chipping in and what I want to do is just create a little bit more texture and break up the body. It's too heavy. I want to have a textured finish here so I'm just picking up sections you know scissor over comb but I'm just chipping into the hair. Because the hair is so thick I can get away with chipping in quite heavily here. I'm going in quite deep with the chipping and that'll when we add product add more texture and I've got a really cool tool I can show you. I don't actually know what it's called but I bought it online and if I can find a link I'll leave a link down below for where you can find one. So this is just a little bit of clay into the hair. I've spread it all over my hands. This is the tool you might have seen these I guess you would call it some sort of like texture comb but you basically put it in to an area clamp it together and it gives you like a uniform texture on the hair. I think it's really cool. It's hard to do just with your fingers this so look at the texture of that. It's kind of like structured mess and this what we've been left with is the end result. I think with blonde hair it really pops like it stands out really well. On dark hair you don't quite see texture so much. On blonde hair look you can see it really easily so that little tool has just kind of messed it all up. Let me know what you think of this. Do you like the haircut? Are you likely to use those texturizing techniques the chipping in the slicing and let me know how you're getting on with your own haircutting. But barber thank you so much for watching. I'll see you again in my next video.