How To: Medium Length Layered Bob Haircut Step By Step Tutorial, Layered Techniques & Tips

hey buddy good morning uh my name is sean bruno and um i am a stylist and educator for bandwagon salon i've been with ben michael this is my uh 15th year here at van michael which is weird because i'm not that old but um when i got my hair i got in the hair because at the time it was avant garde every one new wave was big it was a tournament century so everyone had asymmetrical fashion colors disconnection rat tails you know everyone listened to the fame it was really bold but now the trends are different however it was still super important for me to learn the foundations and basics of cutting hair so that i could apply those to new trends today which are loose movement texture right and being an educator through van michael it's my favorite part of my job not that cutting clients isn't nice but teaching people is nice because you focus on the basics and on helping give that gift to other people that's given so much to me and one of the things i try to talk to people about is don't learn only what's necessary to cut the current trends learn the basics like master the basics you know there are reasons why people like dj still teach your core curriculum classics and people fill his classes open it's because they're really not that simple to cut and once you master the basics you can combine them into other techniques that are far more exciting for you artistically and you can do things that inspire clients as well so one of the things that seems to inspire clients a lot right now is shaggy shapes right so everyone hears this term shag but what is a shag you know i think when i think about a shag i think about the haircut that my parents gave me growing up because they listened to so much rod stewart and rolling stones um i think about 70s rock haircuts right where it was essentially a round little haircut that was short on the fringe and it was to the shoulders and the back because that's what the nature of the hairline is it follows you know up down up down so if you cut the same layers same length all around it makes sense your fringe is going to expose your brow ridge and then the back is going to be down to your shoulders that is considered more mullet nowadays so when a lot of clients talk about shags they don't quite want mullets but some people do so i'll show one of the images or a couple of the images that i seem to be getting a lot from my clientele because again it doesn't really matter how technically proficient you are or how many hear shows you see exciting stuff that if you do things that don't apply to your average everyday person then it's kind of irrelevant right so you have to do things that are really exciting for clients so here's one of the main ones julianne i feel like she has become the new jennifer aniston um known for her hair but you know this is a shaggy bob i love this this is a little bit more um curly wavy texture but i love that i see that all the time and then here is the last one and this is heavier on the fringe but i love that shape so i see these a lot from clients because a lot of my clients that have these kinds of shapes you know this has been a long year for a lot of people and when people are looking to do something different a lot of times they're just sick of looking at themselves in the mirror or looking at themselves on zoom and seeing the same old thing so we're going to cut a bob shape first okay and one of the things that's really important with your bob is to section properly so we're going with the middle section since the vast majority of my haircut is based off of layering and since i'm going to be layering this haircut to death i'm not as strongly focused on my one length being the most insanely clean thing i've ever seen but you want consistency you want balance so i'm going to start by tilting the head slightly forward we're getting a bunch of people from all over the world i've gotten quite a few people actually from like the middle east and a couple of people from the far east right now so i'm from vietnam from israel i'm loving to see that there are people calling in from all over the world and everybody seems to be saying thank you so much for uh talking about that shape because they really do feel like it's a very relevant uh term to be talking about a shag right now it's awesome yeah i mean you know again trends have become kind of kind of an internationally you know trends have become widespread throughout every country and i think that the internet is an incredible tool because with the internet things are not so localized anymore right you can have someone who you think is really cool in your friend circle that has 50 000 followers on instagram so all of a sudden people from tel aviv follow some girl from tupelo and want to look like her hair you know so it's really pretty incredible um and another thing another reason why i chose this shape is because um you know again i've been working in salons since i was 16 so you reach a point where your job doesn't always you know butter your muffin at the end of every single day but some but sometimes i do go through periods where i really do uh look for you know videos online pictures i try to kind of educate myself on what's going on and find things that inspire me sometimes it's education and sometimes it's just photo content and a lot of what i see when i see this haircut being done is things that are kind of more of feel than so technical and i think that it's really important to develop a feel for cutting hair because you can't teach people the feel right and what i mean by that is what just seems right what just looks good right you can't just teach that but you can teach technical proficiency and so you have to be able to do things um properly from a technical perspective so you can replicate them and hopefully teach them as well because if you can't replicate it or if you can't explain it then chances are you need to work on your craft a little bit more so i think it's really important in learning how to do this haircut to know why we're layering it a certain way to know what elements of geometry and physics we're going to use to execute this technique right so real quick basics of one layer layering are one layer haircuts one length haircuts is to tilt the head up once i reach above the occipital bone because the head shape changes right so below the occipital bone i tilt the head down so that it comes natural fall off the indention of the head under the occipital bone once i reach to civil bone i tilt the head back up so that i can cut at natural fall okay yeah we're getting a bunch of people actually from the u.s they've been getting in now the bunch of the east coast from florida up to new york uh michigan's just uh came in and then we're also still getting a lot of people from the other side of the other side of the globe that are just logged on some people saying hi from kazakhstan from the uk from ireland it's great to see people coming from all over and the thing that sean had just mentioned is really important about just knowing your your your traditional basic work you know when you start working with one length shape so many people know don't know how to do it they think they know how to make it but they can't actually make it perfect and one thing i'm going to mention on him i don't know he mentioned this earlier for anybody who's just logged on because i've seen that our numbers have went up quite a bit since then he had mentioned he's not worrying too much about making his one length perfect and that's because this is going to be an extremely layered haircut so it doesn't make any sense to spend an hour cutting a one length shape that's perfect if you're just going to destroy that he can go ahead and use his fingers to add just a touch of graduation because that hair is going to jump anyways once we start layering it right absolutely i mean it's all about knowing when to bend the rules a little bit based on what is coming after okay so um that's something i try to tell my students because you know in our training program um we get a lot of our students are coming out of hair school having been you know on the floor cutting clients cutting models um some of them who come work for our company worked in other salons before they came to work for van michael and so you know when you're trying to teach them how to be not just technically proficient but also you know execute a haircut properly in the salon in a timely fashion if they're going to go through and maximum layer the hair it doesn't make sense to spend 25 minutes cutting the most perfect one length in the world also if a client has told you at the beginning of their service during the consultation which is super important that they really want to focus on keeping their length as much as possible then as soon as you get back there and spend 25 minutes behind their head they're also thinking hey what are you doing we also discussed not cutting a whole lot of my length so that's why it's really important to listen to them to try to take heed to their words right yeah keep in mind especially what he just came spoke about if somebody does say that they want to keep their length there's no way you want to spend a long time cutting on their length because people don't necessarily especially clients understand that there's multiple layers of hair that you're cutting at the same length they just think you're continuing to cut and cut so actually a friend of ours kirsten that works with me at the um sandy springs salon just chimed in and she asked do you always cut the perimeter first or is there a time to cut the layers first like if they don't want much off the length i would say kirsten you're that's a very good question because it's absolutely possible to cut the layers first keep in mind whatever you cut first is going to be stronger so with that said if you wanted it to be really shaggy on the outline and you want it to be i don't say stringy but a little more textured on the very ends definitely do your layers first if you want to still maintain a strong perimeter cut your perimeter first so that it can fall out when you're cutting your layers yeah absolutely i mean you know this cutting the one length first establishes the foundation of my house that i'm going to build the rest of my house on right i'm cutting a shaggy bob i'm not cutting a true shag and if you were going to be cutting a tree shag then you would want to establish the entirety of the shape from the inside out okay so that is a really good question and that is where uh that makes sense okay so here is our one length i went a little bit longer because i want this to still have that kind of you know lobby thing right so before i work further into my shape i'm going to spray a little bit of a leave-in conditioner this is the banana's neutral finish leave-in i love this it just adds a really nice element of moisture to the hair and since the entire point of this haircut is to be a really natural and really textured uh finish spreading moisture in to allow yourself to work easily and effortlessly through the hair as well as to condition it as it dries is really important okay yeah one thing that people crack me up about is wanting to be able to have naturally textured hair but not do anything to it if you don't put any product into naturally textured hair it's it's not going to do anything yeah like nobody looks good with nothing being done in their hair yeah that's all i find all the time a lot of the clients that i've been cutting out for 10 12 13 years they'll actually say to me that one of the things that they like about me is that when they ask for a certain shape if i and i immediately i'm like are you going to dry it or style it like this and they'll say well no i'll say well then let's not do that haircut because it will never look like that on you and they'll say you know thank you because i used to go see someone that would do anything on me and when i got home and trying to style it it always looked terrible so again it's about establishing trust with your client you know but if they ask for it multiple times in a row and you're still telling them no you might need to let the bullet do it anyways yeah my um my mother was a hairdresser for years and years and she used to always tell me if somebody wanted a bad idea she would tell them no you know this isn't a good idea but then say yeah let's try it sure let's try it after a few times it's like hey let's try it you know eventually they're gonna go to someone to do it yeah you know so if it was really bad just do it and then forget to um hand on your business card you know so okay so we've established a back section because the back of the head is where the vast majority of density falls right so the layers in the front are going to be different because there's only about four inches of hair density from the crown to the ear and then even less from the crown or from the apex to in front of so in the back we're talking about eight to ten inches of density depending on how low their hairline is right so we'll turn over actually the other way that's better right yeah so i got a question for you this uh this person's asking right now saying is it also a reason for people to have their hair straightened before you snip their ends um so you can straighten it before you sniff their ends if you want to preserve as much length as possible or if the whole nature of the haircut is a dusting but you're kind of boxed in you know i mean van michael spent you know we opened we reopened the salons during quarantine right after um i think the first week of may some of the salons opened the last week of april we did it because our governor had changed our restrictions and we kind of needed to but we did dry haircuts or wet only haircuts with no blow dry for the first two months so you know it's different you know daniel and i used to cut on stage a lot uh in another time and place in in here but um yeah dry haircuts can tend to box you in a little bit so you know do it if the whole purpose of the haircut is to just dust the hair so real quick so i want to layer this hair shape a lot so i'm basically letting just my length drop out under my nape or right above my knee okay and then i'm going to be cutting a square layer that is perpendicular to the floor as my foundation okay now what makes it a maximum layer is that as i work up the head i continue to elevate and then i continue to cut parallel to the head shape as i work out right because the head rounds a bit more above the occipital bound come up and then cut parallel to that as well right so that falls into an almost totally round layer okay but what you end up having is this beautiful staggered shape that that really kind of it doesn't quite collapse in your length like a concave would it just kind of pushes everything immediately and i love that like it already styles itself and it doesn't get much better than a haircut that styles itself okay so uh just to give you guys a recap a couple of people say they're just logging on and i can see because our numbers just jumped up again so i've got sean brunow here from van michael salons here in atlanta georgia now what shawn's cutting and what you've missed so far it was a very quick one length kind of semi slightly triangular shape where it was just a little bit longer in the front and basically a long bob um outline he did that just with classic one length technique he actually used it cut it with his fingers because we knew that we are going to go into layering uh once this shape had been created so now he's actually starting in the back he started with the center parting and took a vertical section from the crown through to all the way to the bottom of the hairline letting just a little bit fall out cut a little bit of a flat squared layer that then rounded up following the head shape to create maximum layering and so now he's got went from a flat square layer in the back to a little bit of a rounded layer towards the top and that's where we're working right now it looks like we're he's cutting back and forth from side to side for to keep the hair balanced and now i think he's going to be moving on just in a couple sections onto the front one more question that just came in so what product would you recommend for a sleek and smooth style i use a moroccan oil light and kendra blowout cream for straight looks kendra curl cream for textured styles any other product combos you love um for a sleek and smooth you know it's uh it's interesting that you say that because i mean i think that like i've worked with the beta for so long you know when i was in high school i worked in salons that worked with curology that worked with schwarzkopf um that worked with a bunch of different products and um you know you tend to become really comfortable with what you know and i've worked with aveda for so long that aveda is what i know aveda makes a product called glossing straightener that is incredible so if i want someone to be sleek and smooth because it is more of a silicone type base i'll put a touch of aveda style prep smoother in smooth infusion style prep smoother in to act as a humidity combatant brush that all through and then i'll um use a little bit of gloss and straightener and on top of that just lightly and i'll comb that all through that tends to be my favorite uh combination for sleek and smooth okay so there's our uh right side of the back notice how stagger that is okay i love that shape so because i worked um perpendicular to each point of the head where i was pulling a section out from my shape is going to be round until i reach the mastoid right to the corner of the occipital bone and then i over directed that corner back so when you cut vertical sections to make sure your work is clean you want to cross check your work horizontally okay so when you do that you want to see that your line is consistent and smooth right save for a couple of tags because there's no such thing as something looking just perfect on a mannequin they shed like nobody's business yeah i say that crosstrack looks pretty pretty smooth so i think you just covered what somebody was asking somebody was asking if this would if you were dragging back to a stationary guide or if you were using a traveling guide and so definitely traveling stationary would create a um so hair cutting is all geometry okay and um and it's also physics as well so when i'm pulling everything back to a stationary guide in the center it creates a triangular shape right so that's your triangular uh geometric shape and then that also creates a hinge that pushes everything to the front which is where the physics comes in i don't want that i want it to flow with the head and move and because the vast majority of people have round head shapes i want to follow the round of the head okay so that's why i'm pulling perpendicular to each section line and i'm pulling my previous section into my new set or i'm pulling my new section into my previous section but i'm also kind of finding that i'm i'm going between the two right because you don't want to over direct so dramatically back with every section but you also don't want to round dramatically with every section and then you were saying that once you got to about where you are now so this is where i kind of show you guys right here this is where i'm over directing back right so this is where instead of combing towards me which a lot of people tend to keep doing no matter what right now pulls everything forward i'm going to comb everything get you out of the way get out of here i'm going to comb away from my body okay to preserve that length in that corner you can see my gun you cannot see your guide you're working with too big of a section i'm only cutting to my second knuckle and i'm continuing to elevate the entire way up the head okay so another cross check looking good nice it's like i've done this before yeah that's okay i literally you know even even us to teach we still practice at home so you know uh i was cutting this i mean my kids were running around you know my house while i was blasting music and trying to come up with this shape at like 8 30 last night so you know practice make perfect so okay already with the back of the haircut we have this beautiful staggered layered shape i love that okay and i love where these layers are sitting too because one of the issues that a lot of us have is getting volume right and so we end up either undercutting it or trying to tease this crown with a teasing comb with dry shampoo when we could just create the volume with the shape that's where understanding what your client is looking for and understanding the image is really important okay so and then when i cross check this up vertically because i cut center to right and then center to left i need to see that i've got a balanced shape that i'm really just adjusting right so see that so a couple of people just logging back in again we've actually just gotten another big influx of people coming so what we ended up doing is here is we're cutting uh i guess you could call it a shaggy bob like shape it's more of like a actual shag that you've kept an outline though so um but yeah so we are doing a couple of people have asked that other people are asking uh where are you located in atlanta yeah we're uh we are here with van michael salons we are in atlanta we have eight locations here in atlanta and this is we're actually today out at our east cobb location uh this one's actually very convenient because nobody's doing any clients at this location today today's monday so at our buck head salon we do uh we do training every monday there and so luckily whenever we have anything that we need to do on a monday we can always pop into one of the other locations while their staff are taking class at the buckhead salon yeah because the salon that i work at which is the location in the virginia highlands which is the road that is that is off of ponds which kind of is atlanta's central artery that's kind of you know hip avenue uh the i bet half of that client or about half of the salon are working on mondays um because a lot of our staff have been with the company for so long that they would rather work mondays and have saturdays off hey sean can you do me a favor real quick there's a couple of people who have now asked about density of hair can you just pull up that last that very last section of yours the very top section to show how long the shortest layer is absolutely um because what i i'd like to let everybody realize is that this shape is um people are asking about texture if it would work on thick hair and i absolutely think it's possible um because if you look at how short this shortest layer is it's not super short it fall it ends up falling so i've got some stuff coming in from the back or from the front so if you look and see where that falls it falls actually down really close to the occipital bone and my general rule is you want the hair if you're dealing with extremely thick hair you want it at least four inches long on your shortest layer otherwise what will happen is the growth patterns will take over and the hair will start to separate you can end up with ridges in the hair again that's a general rule there's going to be times that you can break it but with thick curly hair because this that shortest layer isn't above the occipital bone there should be no problem whatsoever for creating this shape you may want to texturize a little less because there's already texture in the hair however you can definitely do this shape on just just about anybody right um i mean and that's also the benefit of creating a shape that has so much texture and movement through layering rather than just texture because um one of the reasons why i chose a shape you know when i was trying to figure out what to cut there were so many different kind of avant-garde things i thought about cutting that seem really cool but it's because i see this done a lot and i see it done a lot with shortcuts and these shortcuts are going to look okay when they leave but they're not going to look okay for a long term period and um and a lot of times uh when we just texturize clients to death they don't really love it and it doesn't really create a very good grow out and we have to be considerate of that you know because that's the difference we did between them trusting you to come back and then not okay so here we go we're working over the top okay so i'm actually pulling a sliver of hair from the crown i'm elevating it up vertically okay so there is my guideline okay i'm pulling up parallel to the head but then i'm also working down vertically into the front and i'm going to go slightly and not quite parallel the head shape because again it rounds considerably but um almost kind of creating a little bit of a concave in the front okay so it creates a layer that falls about right there um i'm actually i'm gonna push that just to pinch a pinch further because i want that to be a little bit shorter i can always go through and shorten it up more but i'm going to concave up front just a little bit more super important to talk about too and i share this a lot with our students in our training program is that notice that i'm not just going for broke with one singular chop i'm using multiple snips and only cutting my second knuckle because i want a maximum amount of tension on the hair and i also want a maximum clean lens to my line and i can only get that by cutting with the sharpest point of my shears which is right here right so i'm holding the hair maximum tension starting at the tip of my fingers and working cleanly all the way up into the top of my shape so somebody just asked a second ago about um about what you would do for a side part uh probably the best thing to do for you if you're taking this off of the side is start your guide at the part so that your over direction just works from that so that the shape has a tendency to push apart at that um at that part absolutely you know it's the same similar principles but with the side part you're working with either um or you know you're over going you're either going to over direct to gain enough length to compensate for your side part or you're going to um change your layers a little bit from side to side okay so if you had a dramatic side part this might not be the exact technique for that client because it's going to be impossible to replicate the amount of volume on this heavy side with your light side right you would maybe longer around there this side and have to go so short with a concave on this side that it's going to make the ends feel so thin and in comparison to the other side it's just not going to work so again that's where you have to customize it per your client okay so going back to you kind of rounding with your fingers um they were asking well what kind of scissors or what size scissors do you use because um if if you use big scissors is it easier or harder to do that if you use smaller scissors what size scissors do you have going on there these are five and uh five and a half yeah yeah five and a half um i pretty much only cut with five and a half um i mean when i first went through hair school i cut with whatever the standard issue that they gave me and one of my instructors actually my current director of education jeffrey goldenstein he was the first person to really tell me like hey you know you'd probably be a lot cleaner with your work if you went down in scissor size um and he was coming from that so soon background of you know they cut you know they used to cut with three inch scissors so you know i think that i i'm much more conscious of it now i don't even think about it but big scissors can work it's just that you know with a big shear you tend to push a little bit more with the actual stroke rather than doing multiple smaller strokes to cut yeah i i myself personally um work with two different lengths of shears constantly i like a five inch shear for when i'm cutting shorter hair or doing detail work but then whenever i'm cutting longer hair or thicker hair i like to go through with a five and a half also if i'm doing is any scissor over cone work i like the five and a half because it gives a little more transfer of energy uh through that blade totally i mean with a five and a half i can really get the most out of my thumb right because my entire hand is still the only thing that's moving is my thumb and it's because i only put the corner of my nail bed into the dip of my blade right so i don't have i'm not limited by too much thumb i keep the rest of my hand still and i can really chomp with my five and a half blade yeah so um a couple of people are asking about the shape once again yes he is over directing a stationary guide into the center part what that's going to do is it's going to cause some natural inversion to the shape so the head shape creates a slight concave on this cross check it's not an extreme concave just a little bit and that will let the hair collapse on the sides a little bit while gaining some volume through the top it keeps you from having that mushroomed effect however right so see how already i mean i haven't even scrunched it and already we have that shape taking place in a really nice way and one of the things that distinguishes a shag from typical layers is that the shag outline in the front is dictated by the layers themselves and not necessarily other techniques right so now we have this really cool wispy where again it doesn't even really want to do anything but kick around the cheekbones yeah so a good buddy of mine just logged on a minute ago adam federico i always have to always have to say hi to him he said that if he lived in atlanta he would work with us if we'd have him and god knows we'd have him he's one of my great friends and he is a great hairdresser himself an amazing educator as well so a good shout out to him i really always love seeing him in this virtual world because we don't get to travel and see each other as much as we used to the last class i took before the world begin to end was adam's class with richard the seiko and that was an awesome class we had a great time great content was covered adam and richard were awesome we even went to a heavy metal show after the uh it was totally cool all right and then people are logging on saying that how beautiful this shape's already becoming um also a friend of mine steven rose just logged in from new york i hope he's doing well i uh he's actually a phenomenal hairdresser but he's also a phenomenal barber as well and i love every time i get to see him do any work he can really i love his what he can do free handing with clippers is just amazing that's cool that's really cool so many that's the amazing thing about hair brand is that it's just such a vast community of people you know so many resources to take advantage of i think what gerard has done is amazing i think as a community to inspire people to give people the ability to um to share their information to grow to gain to get tools is really cool because this was not really that was not the case you know when i got i mean i i'm not that old but you know i did get into hair just before the information age took over and um it was kind of you know like the tools of the trade and becoming technically excellent it was kind of these like esoteric secrets that you had to work in certain places to get um you know you could not just go on your phone and watch um a former creative director of sassoon london uh do amazing shapes for free you had to get a job in a certain salon which meant that you usually had to prove yourself worthy of their content you know usually took a long time you had to fold towels sweet floor go run and get food orders uh be belittled on a daily basis to get there and so now it's really cool that there's just a community full of information yeah it's really cool the greatest thing about harebrained is the the information the information that's out there and that it's all you know just a community in which people do get to share information about techniques about tools about everything that you need to know in this industry good and bad so so we're finishing up on this side okay so again a stationary guide through the top we had a traveling guide to the back creating a internally round shape but on the top we have round or more concave this way but also more concave this way because whenever you invert everything into a stationary guide you gain length as you work down the head shape okay and concave also uh collapses hair right so if i want the sides to be collapsed concave is a surefire way to do it yeah and if you think about this also so what sean's doing is he's bringing everything to to the center so on a horizontal plane like so you can see that over direction causes a concave which makes it collapse horizontally because very few people want it to expand horizontally it's very rare you see somebody saying like yeah i really want to look like a mushroom but at the same time on a vertical plane from front to back it's it's round and it follows the head shape which is going to allow for some volume in the in the crown and some volume in the uh throughout the the entire top of the shape and not so much on the sides okay cool so one young lady uh put it in a second ago she goes i went in to get this haircut and came out with a mullet it's very easy to happen well i actually was going to discuss that a little bit more because a lot of times when people say that they want shags you know everyone kind of has a different definition for what a shag means and a lot of what i see happening nowadays are more mullet type techniques which is why it's important to remember that you know consultation uh definite images techniques that is so key it really is so cute so hannah ruth evans just uh chimed in and said this shape looks great sean i will give her a little bit of a plug out there because actually next month's hairbrained live is going to have hannah actually emceeing in place of me with a good friend of ours uh kenneth dawson who is an amazing uh hairdresser on so many different levels he's good with men's hair he's good with highly textured hair he's good with styling hair and one thing that he's going to go through with you guys is a bit of i believe a braiding technique that should be really cool and that will be next month and hannah will be emceeing that one so great to see you in here hannah and thank you for the little shout out to sean thanks hannah yeah you guys are in for a treat kenny's awesome i mean with braiding he's amazing and the fact that he's going to wake up in time to pray for you guys is incredible yeah and the thing that's great about that also is hannah has to be one of the best people i know at explaining things to the smallest detail so when you see something like a braiding technique or a hair cutting technique or a texturizing technique that just looks so uh just haphazardly or looks like there's no real technique to it hannah can break it down and explain it to the so that everyone in the world could understand so you guys i highly recommend you log into that one next month all right so we're going to create a little bit more of a intentionally uh sweeping curtain fringe okay and i don't pretend to be the best at cutting here ever but i do uh know that however i cut bangs works well enough where every girl in my salon that has curtain fringe wants me to cut them and um and it's just doing basic you all right there yeah he's like a ninja over here i am so it's just doing basic uh basic geometry with basic physics okay so if we want the curtain to swing this way then we need to create a v shape right which is a concave kind of hard to pull everything down one length and just freehand this so what we can do is we can split it down the middle and we can hinge each side the opposite way cut a flat plane this way flat plane this way creates a v and then that hinge over directing this way will also push everything this way which is where our physics comes in to accent around the cheekbones right so very simple technique that i think executes it much easier than a lot of the techniques that i see being done nowadays again nothing wrong with people doing things just by feel but i prefer if something can be technically explained and broken down it's going to have a longer lasting value so i'll tell you this much sometimes people over complicate things or sometimes people just take it too easy in my opinion and so basically what you're talking about is this just use the you know classic technique or the classic fundamentals that short hair pushes long and allow that short hair to push the hair away from the nose or away from the cheekbone or wherever you want the hair to go away from right so that really is just keeping you from over complicating it making it very simple while at the same time using the the true laws of physics with the hair and the true dynamics right and so you can also see that i'm working on a 45 degree plane because i want my v to be a very simple v so and each section is going to mirror that same uh cut line okay and i'm graduating and that i'm trying to build up just enough weight where the fringe still has a definite shape by not over elevating okay we used to call this um this technique when i was going through our training program in-house bread and butter because that was when every every one of them every you know uh woman with long hair wanted to frame just so and this was the easiest way to achieve said frame without going you know bonkers uh combing everything down and just constantly going like this you know so sean when did you start with the company what 2005 2006 yeah i mean 15 years coming up there there was right uh probably about two years before that there was a cover of uh l magazine with heidi klum on it and she had this awesome square fringe right at her brow and every woman came in with that picture and got the fringe and then right after that about the time that you were going through the training program every woman realized how much they hated it and wanted to grow it out and this was really that bread and butter technique that we used to help women grow their bangs out well and then during that time was when um two covers came out that were huge one was reused for the spoon on the cover of l with her frame and the other was misha barton and those things everybody wanted um and then victoria beckham cut her hair off and then all we did for the next three years was the victoria beckham or fix people's victoria vacuums exactly exactly which i still love that technique we used to call it the sway because it uh it had a bias on top and you know biases are a great way to get students to you know be frustrated okay so try to match the sides out so real quick you can see that i have this v right here okay this is a tricky thing to match the sides up so i pull to where i have just the corner of my v and i cut this side to match okay and then what i'll do is i'll hinge this side equally to where now see there's my length of the corner okay match it up with my line and now i have this nice b it's like the best way to go about matching up concave graduation in the front okay so get out of the way the other thing that's really important right now is when you start working side to side and over directing over hair that you've already cut to keep your work clean the way that shawn section that away so that we can make sure you end up not cutting your first side once again because that absolutely happens and that little technique is getting a lot of play right now a lot of people are saying aha it was like an aha moment for them and thank you very much and sweet awesome that's awesome i love such such a great thing when the light bulb turns on you know you can never be cutting hair long i like um one when we took that psycho class with um with uh with richard richard yeah um he was talking about the importance of point cutting in horizontally and doing it in a bricklayer pattern to basically break things down this way and i remember hannah and i going hannah evans there her and i going to uh lunch right after that and being like oh my god why have i never thought of that before because we've been point cutting how we've been point cutting for the last you know too many years and we've never thought of it okay so now we've got the basics of our shape okay so one of the things i want to do real quick is i want to and this is where you can kind of customize because you know when you have a haircut that's done wet the haircut is essentially a rough sketch it has to be dry for you to go through and put your finishing touches your personal signature on it right otherwise you're just doing a blue a blueprint so before i dry it because i'll kind of show you guys i'm going to do a rachel ray technique and show you guys the finished technique so you don't have to watch for another 20 minutes while i diffuse it and scrunch it is we want a little bit less bulk being in the corners of the fringe right so something i like to do is i like to start where my bulk is then i'll just kind of really lightly grab what i want to channel into and then i'll just channel it a little bit okay and you guys can see he's opening closing those shears just a little bit not fully closing because that'll chop right off but but just opening and closing cutting down the hair shaft removes a lot of weight i'm almost completely parallel to my hair shaft because if you're trying to kind of go with things more uh perpendicularly you're going to take too much hair out it's made too aggressive and also in in grabbing a little bit with my fingers like this i'm allowing a light enough amount of tension where i'm not causing an unnatural jump in the hair right yeah the the other thing about that you know is when you do that little bit of a slicing technique you want to stay going down the hair shaft because then you're cutting with the hairs cuticle if you cut against the hair shaft you're actually going to blow open that cuticle and when you're talking about a shape like this that one of the great things about this shape is that you can leave this shape alone let it dry with just a little bit of diffusing it and use your natural texture you do not that whenever you use natural texture you're not going to have near the finish on the cuticle that you do when you smooth it out with a blow dryer so you don't want the idea of you just tore up that cuticle because then it'll really show especially around the face right where he's doing this you've got to make sure you use you know sharp scissors open and close like he's doing and make sure that you're not pulling and going against the uh the cuticle you want to make sure you're working with the hair um i guess a good general rule of thumb would be if you can hear your shears scraping against the hair you probably need to be using your thumbs a little bit more you know if it sounds or sharpening your shears exactly you know it's such a painful sound every now and then you know when i know my shirt is going to be sharpened and i'll do some sort of a kind of dry defined technique with my shearers and i can hear that sound i'll almost immediately look at my client and even under their mouth you can just see they go is that normal i promise this is normal this happens all the time yeah it happens in all my redos totally it's my favorite thing to go in on my off date with it yeah okay so the other thing that you know a lot of these shapes tend to have is a little bit of a kind of peekaboo fringe right so that happens if they want that then you could do the same exact technique this way and just really lightly you know grab pinch we're getting a lot of people liking your teaching technique but liking this shape more they're really uh people are sending in a lot of likes and loves about the actual shape glad y'all like it i mean you know because this stuff is this is the stuff that people want and like i said you know i mean i totally totally tweak out on doing you know half of people's heads being shaved with rat tails and asymmetry and all that kind of stuff and again but when i was getting into hair 20 years ago that is what people wanted but that's not really what a lot of young people want right now so this is the stuff that's important that people want and um like i said in just a minute after i get them to find this i'm gonna pull um the cake out of the oven and show you guys how the cake just happens to look immediately you know sorry i've been watching a lot of halloween baking shows so i'm kind of thinking like that what shears are these somebody just asked so these are serramos and serramo was a short-lived company that my education director jeffrey goldenstein had um and they basically are also akin to the van michael shears and the van michael shears i left them on the salon i love them this long because i use them that much but we are producing our own shears now which is the same basic format but essentially it's a semi offset five and a half uh and i i honestly i love it you know because to me it allows for maximum amount of movement dexterity um again the blade is not too long it's not too clumsy it's an easy um what do you even call that part the actual tension screws the ball bearing yeah the bearing you know um yeah it's just they're easy to maintain to work with uh okay cool so that is the basis of our shape so what i would recommend doing would be to you know again you've got your leave-in so at the beginning i sprayed nutraplenish leaving into this so that i could comb through the hair and then it would be gentle working through with my blade okay and then something that you can also use and i strongly recommend people using products like this would be um um yeah texture tonic love love love aveda texture tonic now if the hair has the ability or the natural tendency to frizz a lot you can use more of a leave-in conditioner product of course there's people piping in from all over the world so everyone has their preferred products but you want to you know decent amount of moisture a decent conditioning vibe you don't want to go totally crazy when you use this product so what i recommend is let's say that i do use a conditioning product okay i will use something like aveda's smooth infusion styling cream love this stuff not that my hair looks amazing but it's the only thing i put into my hair so what i'll do is i'll usually put you know for for hair that i want to still have a shape and move i'll put you know nothing crazy right and you want to start in the back start the ponytail because the density is where the majority of your product needs to go if you start in the front all of the hair that tends to get oily the quickest from the skin is going to be oily that fast it's going to look like you never even washed your hair in the first place so i'm going to start in the back work my way on the sides and then work my way around the front okay yeah one thing also is sean mentioned before you know he'd sprayed in a leave-in conditioner in the hair before cutting this which ends up making it very you know balanced throughout the head because natural texture looks best when it looks balanced not when it's like super curly in the back and straight in the front so the fact that he's already moved all that product through really helps a lot absolutely absolutely and you know i don't want there to be much of a jump in the fringe so that dries up because i was coming back so much then i am going to re-wet that and comb that into natural fall okay yeah somebody had mentioned earlier what about calyx at the fringe and really to be honest with you with this long of a haircut it um or this long of a fringe you shouldn't have any issues with it but what you should end up with is the ability to as it starts to dry detail that fringe a little bit more because one side may shrink up a touch more than the other right absolutely so you just took a bit of a texture time so texture tonic is aveda's version of like a salt spray but instead of using just sea salt they also use um sugar water so that it's not as drying on the hair so saline and sugar water to give it that kind of little bit of a tackier hold without um without being crunchy you know that's that's the other thing about curly hair there's a fine line between having a lot of hold i sometimes like using gel and curly hair but not making it crunchy you know working it through scrunching it enough with your hands that you don't end up with that that uh you know that hard hair right because i mean really clients do not like it when their hair feels hard you know um i think that that's when you'll probably end up losing them on the natural curly vibe i've got a couple of people asking you to cut their hair come come see him and come into atlanta he's at our he's at our uh virginia highlands location a couple of people asking also where can you buy those sheers the van michael scissors are www.vanmichaelscissors.com they're actually really nice that they're all uh 240 dollars and we even have a use a company called partially if you would like to um not actually pay all at once but do a payment plan so it's really a great deal for those of you who are asking again i'll put in the comments when i when this ends it's www.vanmichaelscissors.com okay so now mr rachel ray here is doing our cooking technique admittedly i was going to blow dry this last night but i have two kids that are 10 and six and by the time i was done with this the witching hour had begun and it was my job to quickly pay them and put them in a bed so i let her air dry and then when i i'd already put texturing spray in there but i'd let her air dry and then when i came downstairs it looked so good that i didn't want to do anything else to it so she's going to go to the dryer and this is what it turned into by the time i came upstairs so looks great i love it i i really do i love it so the only thing that i'm going to do now that this is so i'm going to loosen it up just a little bit so oh hold on real quick you can see from the profile it has such a beautiful natural texture that to me when someone is looking into getting a shape and they want their natural curl to breathe and these mannequins are not very curly um you almost are having to teach them to do that not curled trick with a flat iron or curling iron and the the dexterity required is pretty difficult to navigate even with stylus so this just breathes so nicely that you know this just does the job for them the only thing that i would like to do is i would like to enhance that kind of you know peekaboo fringe situation just a little bit more okay so i'm going to really lightly point cut into the center of my fringe to just shorten up a little bit oh stephanie k colb just logged on hey guys great to hear you haven't spoke to you in a while i hope all is great you're getting a lot of wows and beautifuls on this this this shape's really coming together that's awesome i'm miss stephanie i used to use stephanie and her husband because they had cable when i did and we would watch nick tuck together oh i miss niptuck every time they come out with a new season of american horror story i'm like when are they going to bring that tuck back yeah so again really really lightly uh channeling through to create that kind of peekaboo interest fringe okay because it's all about the fringe that's like a non-committal fringe right so again i'm just really using the tips of my fingers to lightly grab with minimum tension and then the base of my blade where i'm constantly opening it to really lightly channel open and then i'm also going to like you know just really gently push this away because it's all about you can actually create more push away by uh slicing through in the direction you want there to move because i believe daniel might have actually been the one that taught me this um when you go internally and you create internal slicing or channeling whatever direction you do it in is the direction the hair pushes because you're actually internally layering the hair okay so if i want this fringe to push out a pinch more this way if i channel through this way then as it grows out the hair is going to naturally push that same direction okay and then it creates this really nice natural frame through here a couple of people been saying well this is great for such wash and wear of a look it's true right now also especially with a lot of people not going into work or they're doing tele you know telecommuting it's really very nice to give people a look that looks great they can get on a zoom call but they don't have to have spent hours just you know getting their hair all quaffed because let's face it the the little bit more of the bohemian feel right now has definitely been more in right it's almost bohemian by default of like societal standards like no one's really doing new things so you know of course it's becoming more popular right oh yeah that looks awesome yeah i love that i love that and again you know it's all about doing things that are easy to wear and that you don't have to do a lot too so i'm going to give you guys just a quick overview again because people are logging on saying that they missed it a couple of things that you can do is this also if you would like to get onto my facebook this will be reposted just momentarily and that way you can watch it from the beginning if you'd like and you can actually move through however you'd like a couple of people are asking about the products once again what what sean did was he used um aveda's nutraplenish leave-in conditioner to prep the hair and actually cut with that in the hair then used a there was a blue bottle it's called um smooth infusion nourishing styling cream that was just a nice cream to give a little bit of moisture to the hair tame down any frizz and then he scrunched with a bit of the aveda's texture tonic which is a saline spray so these are the three products that he used there's the leave-in coming through and cutting this for styling to add moisture and a little bit of shine and tame down on the frizz and then this to make her look like she kind of don't care yeah what's your facebook name to re-watch it's daniel holzberger h-o-l-z-b-e and it's d-a-n-i-e-l for daniel oh and then a little bit of again two this i can't say enough good things i know dry shampoo is popular but this is my favorite hairspray in the world because it's not really a hairspray it's almost like the dry shampoo before dry shampoo because all it does is puts granules into the hair so if i want to be like a little bit of extra volume in the crown and i don't want to necessarily put in tons of you know tons of dry shampoo powder i'll spray a load of this it gives me a little bit of pump if i want the fringe to stay put but not necessarily to be crunchy yeah there's by no means is this a lacquer hairspray that is definitely just a very light one it's called air control it's it's definitely one of the bread and butter uh products that we have here in our salons because we are in a veda salon and uh we definitely like to use products especially for me if you're gonna try to have wash and wear hair you've got to prep the hair with some products to keep it from keep it from looking un unkept and actually right now you can see this great view of this uh basically this is a shag with a almost a like a long bob length uh and really with an amazing fringe that sean cut on this mannequin so guys we're gonna we're gonna finish up here uh i wanna say thank you to sean for giving us this expertise because it looks amazing and he did such a good job with educating please if anybody wants you can also log on to watch this again and if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact me through facebook or you can also contact myself or sean on instagram i'm daniel j holzberger on instagram and i believe you are evil you will underscore sean don't be disappointed because it's not really pictures of hair but you will see pictures of my kids and the bands that i played so just so you know but i really appreciate you guys paying attention um education is everything it's the difference between people that burn out in five years and people that stay in the industry for a long time take it in your own hands and again get excited about it because here is an exciting art form but it is a trade as well so you have to do art that inspires you but it also services the people that feed you as well so thank you so much for having us thank you sean