Unnatural character

Soft, delicate and light or hot, intense and vibrant, unnatural hair color shocks and makes you feel dressed up even in your sweats.

Ideal for medium brown hair and lighter, difficult for dark brown and black, unnatural hair color demands special maintenance because it fades faster than it grows out. The pigment must be refreshed before the new growth must be touched up.

Tasteful and simple

Keep to one overall or to one area-accent color; it saves you from turning clownish and simplifies repigmentation. Separate two or more colors well, if the design permits, so that they don’t bleed onto each other during or after the application.

Embrace radical change by pre-lightening  with bleach or darkening with tint. Explore, both, pastels and primary colors. Or simply change the natural color slightly just to where it becomes unnatural turning a brown scarlet, a red tangerine, a blonde gold, or a paler blonde icy.

Mind your lightening stages

Take advantage of the moderate lift of tints and , when bleaching, of the manufacturer’s recommendations for pre-lightening to the correct stage necessary for a specific unnatural color. Remember that not pre-lightening enough leaves too much natural pigment and insufficient porosity to accept, show, and keep the unnatural color pigment. Pre-lightening too much, on the other hand, rids of contributing natural pigment necessary for the unnatural color to work and leaves too much porosity for the pigment to hold.

Avoid vicious circles

Finally, unless you’re correcting a problem, repigmentize  only with temporary color or with temporary color formulations as most tints and developers appropriate for touching up the new growth are too aggressive for the already processed hair (particularly the ends) and create unnecessary porosity which, in turn, result in more fading.

The job at hand

I’m often reminded of what my work really is. I’m a hair designer because I design hair and, to that end, work with design elements: form, color, texture, and balance. Yet my work isn’t really to cut or color hair; haircutting and hair coloring are just some of my tools. My real work is coordinating hair design elements into hair design solutions for people’s problems, needs, and compelling desires. Hair design solutions; that’s my work –the hair designer’s work.

Only after acknowledging so can I begin to design.

The main element

Without a form, I have nothing, so that’s where to begin. Reading the hair texture tells me what is and isn’t feasible. The subject narrows the many possibilities to the right shape.

The second and third most important elements

From there, I consider how color might contribute to the texture and to the general shape, and how further cutting might enhance the hair color and the texture as well.

The fourth element

How will the shape, color, and texture hang together? Will the composition balance? What will the design say? Will it say enough? Will it say too much?

There are three dilemmas to face when planning a haircut: where to begin, when to end, and what to do in between. The problem is that there are so many tools, techniques, and expectations to fulfill that for the newcomer, considering even the simplest haircut can be a paralyzing experience.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Most haircutters come into the industry expecting to create every day. Some are fortunate to find mentors to fan their creative sparks into flames, others are wise to sensitize to hair behavior.

Motivating yourself

For the inexperienced, minding hair behavior might seem like just another burden to bear in an already demanding field, but the opposite is true. Hair behavior gives you a place to begin, reference points to check your work against, and saves you from running out of ideas. More importantly, hair behavior enables you to communicate with and guide the subject intelligently. Additionally, to enjoy automated suitability because, after all, hair grows as it does for the rest of the subject’s body and, of course, free maintenance because the correct length leaves the hair no option but to behave as designed.

Ask most people what precision haircutting is and you’ll hear things about perfectly accurate haircutting execution. And yes, it is that, but that isn’t all it is. In fact, it isn’t even mostly that.

Specifics

Precision haircutting is haircutting that capitalizes on hair behavior. Precision here  refers more to design than to execution. Specifically, to the appropriateness of the chosen length in relation to, both, hair texture and desired result. What this means is that, while both are important, design is by far more relevant than execution.

Driving it home

If you could have just one, which would you prefer, a slightly rough (uneven) haircut that addresses your hair’s and personal needs or a perfect one that disregards your lifestyle and natural hair behavior? Right, a technically correct haircut alone is like a perfect surgical procedure on the wrong body part.

Haircutting science

Although widely perceived as art, haircutting is science, mainly, because it relies on factors that yield predictable results. Art, in that it implies creative ability, is irrelevant to sound haircutting. Creativity does not make a good hair cutter, comprehension of hair behavior does.

Hair behavior

Hair can be categorized in three major textures: straight, wavy, and curly. Each texture behaves inherently differently than the others at any given length comprising, in behavior, practical and aesthetic functions. Whether practical as the support a wave holding the hair off the face provides or aesthetic as the face-framing fall that straight hair enables, hair behavioral functions represent real haircutting design options (haircuts) we may pursue.

Hair behavior accounts for every possible haircutting result including those we might deliberately pursue or ignore, stumble upon by chance, and remain oblivious of.

Haircutting Design

For its infinite manifestations, hair behavior is remarkably consistent and, therefore, predictable. Its predictability renders invention redundant and haircutting design a simple matter of choosing the particular behavior which, when isolated, will serve best.

The reductive nature of haircutting further restricts the process to elimination. The hair behavior already exists before its practical and aesthetic functions are isolated by the haircutting process –The point isn’t to create, but to isolate.

Our perception of what haircutting is determines our approach to haircutting design. If we believe that haircutting is a creative pursuit, we’ll assume unnecessary tasks, and rely on trial and error. Nothing can be gained by a creative approach to haircutting that can’t be had easier, better, and faster by awareness of hair behavior.