It Took Me Five Years to Learn How to Cut Hair

Cut It Kinky isn’t going to teach you a specific haircut.

Transparent moment, it took me 5 years to learn how to cut hair.

In cosmetology school the step by step haircuts in my Milady’s/Aveda textbook looked like Greek to me. I had such trouble understanding partings and elevation that my instructor stayed with me after school for two hours on a Saturday night just reviewing how to cut the occipital of this particular haircut.

During my time as an assistant at a salon in central Florida, I was always the last to leave our Tuesday night haircutting classes. My boss would dismiss me out of sheer exhaustion around 9:30pm after a full 13 hour day. It wasn’t that I couldn’t learn how to cut hair, I just did not understand the foundational theory behind hair cutting.

Something clicked when I began my journey as a tight curl artist five years after being licensed. After taking one life changing 2-D curl class I went back to the salon to apply my new knowledge to my completely 3-D curl clients. I can laugh about this now but that was a complete and utter failure. 

Not knowing what else to do I pulled out those same cosmetology textbooks and proceeded to spend a year teaching myself haircutting all over again. I discovered that the reason many emerging and established cosmetologists (myself included) struggled with haircutting was that we were taught specific haircuts, not the foundation of hair cutting. This intense year of study and development birthed Cut it Kinky.

Over here there’s no Suzy, no Melody, no step by step rote haircut to do on everyone. We teach fundamental cutting theory. When you break the essence of haircutting down, there are only four techniques used to cut hair and three directions in which to position your fingers/shears.

While length, condition, and expectations all influence how we craft a clients hair cut, we often we are working to connect holes and compromising for breakage, baby crowns, mullets, and dog ears. What we teach in our Level 1 Tight Curl Digital Summit is how to apply foundational cutting techniques and directions to cutting the 3-dimensional hair that has been presented to you to reach the desired finish on ALL hair.

Want to up your haircutting game? Learn more about our education tracks.