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Introduction

If you’ve ever dreamed of becoming a painter, a sculptor, or a home decorator, you have a talent for cutting hair. The same holds true if you love designing, drawing, or helping your kids with their art projects. Haircutting For Dummies, 2nd Edition is designed to help you discover your inner artist — and put this artist to good use! With this book at your side, you can easily enhance your loved ones’ haircuts while trimming big bucks off your family’s grooming budget.

About This Book

I wrote this book for people like you who want to cut their family and friends’ hair at home in order to save time and money, be creative, and do something nice for those who trust you with their good looks. Haircutting For Dummies, 2nd Edition offers good advice on how to do simple trims and styles, while giving your own creative spirit plenty of room to roam.

Haircutting For Dummies, 2nd Edition is the most comprehensive yet free-spirited book written for the home haircutter. It lives up to its name by giving step-by-step instructions for the latest short, medium, and long hairstyles, as well as more advanced haircutting techniques like slicing, notching, and texturing the hair. To help you achieve these creative looks, this snip-and-tell guide provides insider information about the tools you need to support your handiwork, ways to follow lengths and angles, and above all, how to have fun while you’re creating your show-stopping styles!

Anytime you find yourself hungry for even more haircutting knowledge, this book also contains a wealth of information about how to style your masterpieces, tips on maintaining your own haircut, and countless ways to shamelessly bribe young children into behaving like angels while you cut their hair. You should also be on the lookout for tips on ways to judge texture, strength, and the health of the hair, and how to find out what people really want their hair to look like before taking a single snip.

Conventions Used in This Book

Before I throw you into the step-by-steps of any haircut in this book, I let you know how difficult the cut will be to do. I have based my ratings on a scale from the easiest cuts to the most difficult ones:

 Easiest

 Easy

 Moderate

 Advanced

 Most advanced

Your current ability to cut hair — coordination with handling scissors, ability to judge length, and a knack for creating the correct shapes — should dictate the degree of difficulty you undertake. If creating accurate haircutting lines challenges you, for instance, or your hair sections still tend to drift to one side or the other, avoid anything higher than a Moderate rating until these basic skills become second nature to you.

The illustrations in this book give you a good idea of what steps to take while cutting hair. Keep in mind that a solid line means that this is where hair should be parted. A broken line indicates where you should cut the hair.

And finally, an italicized word means that a beauty-pro term is heading your way.

Foolish Assumptions

Having been a home haircutter many times in my life, I’ve experienced most of the motivations behind trimming your little beauty queen’s hair, crisping the lines of a man’s haircut, or extending the life of your own haircut by taking a few strategic snips off the ends. All that was missing in my household was a fun, friendly book on haircutting. While writing this book, I assumed that you’ve found yourself in similar situations (and without a lively, straightforward book). I also made a few other assumptions about you.

If one or more of the following statements describes you, Haircutting For Dummies, 2nd Edition is probably your kind of book.

 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.

You want anecdotes? I got anecdotes. After years of experience cutting hair and knowing people who cut hair, I get to share with you some of my funniest stories.

This icon makes your life easier by marking special hair-related tidbits throughout the book. These bits of information signal an activity that saves you time or useful knowledge born of experience.

Think danger! This icon warns you to tread carefully. Although nothing in this book puts the hair or scalp in mortal peril, this icon tells you to pay close attention to what you’re doing and how to avoid common pitfalls. Your health or hair could turn out worse for the wear if you don’t follow this advice.

I use this important icon to call out basic rules and information that you can file away for future reference whenever you encounter related situations.

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.