STOP BEATING UP THE HAIR!

Create Today’s Undercuts, Not Yesterday’s Over-cutting

I’m really pleased with the current undercut looks, because we’re seeing a return to integrity. Let’s stop beating up the hair and over-cutting in our attempt to achieve texture! Instead, we’ve discovered that we can take the strongest technique in design today, disconnection, and control the cut. This changes everything!

Think about the difference. When you go in with traditional chunking shears to remove weight, you may get a great result—the first time. But when your guest returns for her next visit, can you recut the exact same hairs you cut inside of a line six weeks earlier? Impossible! That’s what I mean by beating up the hair. We keep cutting new hairs, and the integrity is lost. With each visit, our guest gets less and less of the volume she wants because there’s not enough length inside the haircut.

Now what happens when we apply disconnection to achieve the soft looseness that keeps these looks feminine and gives them volume and movement? We create blunt, solid lines that you can’t even tell are disconnected until you turn the head upside down. The lines are distinct, so this is something we can control from visit to visit. The look is fresh each time. It’s so exciting!

Where should you place the volume? Right now we’re seeing the volume move back up to the crown. It’s a slight throwback to the hippy ’60s; we’re also seeing some ’70s and ’80s disco glamour with a twist. Some of this requires educating your clients to think of those retro looks in a 2009 way.

Also retrain your guest’s eye to see frizz differently. It’s not evil! And explain that today’s “undone” hair needs a bit of maintenance to create the unstructured curl. You can take our Textur tool, pinch at the base for the volume and bring the hair right over it. Go around the head pinching at the base, and you’ll have volume. Then if you put in a hot roller or curl the hair with a curling iron, it will hold because you’ve crimped at the base only. That’s the new “undone.” Check out a technique called “Textured Volume” on our website. For many of the texture techniques I do, my product of choice is Redken’s Fabricate 03.