What's Wrong With This Picture?

This picture shows evidence of a traditional wet cut. In the before picture, you can see at the bottom are wispy ends. This happens when curly hair is cut using traditional wet-cutting techniques. The hair is pulled down taut and cut straight across, then released to have the curls bounce back up according to their curl structure.

The problem with this is that not every curl is the same. It is sometimes most evident when someone has tighter curls around the face or at the nape of their neck, or even sometimes looser waves at the top. The reality is that we have inconsistent curls all over our heads!

For example, say you have a looser wave next to a tighter curl grouping and it was cut wet and pulled taut. Once it dries to its normal and chill-out state, the tighter curl, which has shrunk up, will be visually shorter than the wave. This results in wispy and thin-looking ends.

The remedy is dry curl cutting. Each curl is cut in its individual, untampered-with formation according to where it lives in conjunction with the rest of the curls around it, resulting in a visually appealing and more symmetrical cut.

Lanis is wanting to keep growing her length so we trimmed just a tad off the bottom and will gradually let that fill in as she gets her trims every four months or so. Some individual curl cutting in the rest of the lengths add to the visual symmetry and make the most of her curl pattern.

As always, feel free to share, as curl-by-curl cutting is not taught in Beauty School and is a highly individualized and specialty field.