You feel the urge to express your creativity and haircutting is an attractive outlet.
You’re happy saving hundreds of dollars each year in haircutting costs simply by maintaining your family’s hair at home.
You want to extend the time between your own visits to the salon.
You love pleasing people by making them feel good about the way they look.
You want to have better control over your personal time by limiting your salon visits.
You buy every book on the market with a yellow and black cover.
You’re considering a career in haircutting and want a taste of what it’s like to be a successful hairdresser.
Icons Used in This Book
Throughout this book you find a collection of handy icons in the margins. These icons perform useful functions to maximize your use of Haircutting For Dummies.
Beyond the Book
The Cheat Sheet is an awesome way to explore bite-sized information on some of the most important points about cutting and caring for hair. Are you curious about how to slide cut? How about hair plopping or 10 different ways to create fringes and curtain bangs? If you’re excited — even passionate — about hair, simply go to www.dummies.com and type “Haircutting For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
Where to Go from Here
Like all For Dummies books, Haircutting For Dummies, 2nd Edition is divided into easy, manageable sections that allow you to start anywhere that addresses your needs or questions. Diving into the middle of the book works just as well as starting at the beginning. In a nutshell, how you read this book is up to you. You can go from front to back, back to front (a little more difficult, but still manageable), or start with the basics chapters and then head to a step-by-step haircut that strikes your fancy.
Now, here’s one final note before you dive in: Please remember that haircutting is a subjective art. My haircutting instructions represent just one method to doing the fun haircutting designs in this book. After you become more skilled with haircutting, feel free to experiment with different approaches to these same styles. What you’re really doing is honing your personal style of cutting — something everyone needs to do in order to produce one-of-a-kind works of art.
Part 1
Shopping, Talking, and Acting Like a Pro
IN THIS PART …
Get up close and personal with how to set up a cutting area.
Select the tools you need to get cutting.
Become a beauty sleuth and typecast hair –– two major skills that seriously contribute to your cutting success.
Chapter 1
Setting Up Shop: Kitchen Beauticians
IN THIS CHAPTER
When my friend Ling Moon first arrived in the United States, she was overwhelmed by all the different hair colors and textures that dotted the American landscape. Although I didn’t have the heart to tell her until much later that many of the hair colors she saw were chemically created, I did identify with how she felt about the diversity of hair all around us.
Everyone’s hair texture, growth patterns, and length are different, making every haircut a unique cutting experience. And because you’ll always have an endless supply of the stuff — rain or shine, hair grows about ½ inch (1.3 centimeters) per month — haircutting is also one of the few artful activities where saving money is a sure thing. If you cut your family’s hair just sometimes, you can shave dollars off your grooming budget. And if you find yourself falling in love with haircutting, becoming a licensed stylist could give you the chance to make an above-average wage.
Discovering Your Inner Artist: Do You Have What It Takes?
Haircutting is a three-dimensional art form consisting of different lengths, angles, and elevations. While haircutting is a simple science, it only produces exceptional results when you also draw on your unique talents. If you think that you don’t have any talents worth considering, think again. It certainly helps to be a sculptor, a painter, or an all-around artistic fellow, but talents needed for haircutting also come from other areas that may surprise you.
Do you love to paint, draw, or sculpt?
Do you love to work with software graphics?
Are you mechanically inclined?
Do you have carpentry or handyman skills?
Do you know how to sew?
Do you have a strong sense of symmetry?
Are you methodical by nature?
Knowing how to sew, for instance, means that you’re adept at putting pattern pieces together — a skill that you can apply to creating the various sections of your haircuts. If you have drafting or carpentry skills, the precision of your angles can make your haircuts look exceptional. And if you have the gift of symmetry, or you’re extremely methodical, your haircuts will be straight and true — two of the major challenges for real artistic types who intuitively cut hair.
This list makes up just a smattering of the talents you can draw from to create exceptional haircuts. For instance, I personally don’t draw, paint, sew, fix houses, or assemble my child’s toys, but I do apply my own unique sense of balance that brings a signature