My mentor told me to stop using thinning shears on curly hair

When I first started cutting hair about five years ago, I was working at a shop in Tampa. I had a client with really thick, curly hair and I was trying to soften up the bulk. I reached for my thinning shears, but the older barber next to me, a guy named Ray who had been cutting for thirty years, put his hand on my arm and said, 'Don't. You'll make it frizzy.' I listened, and just used my regular shears to point cut and remove weight carefully. The cut came out clean and the curl pattern stayed intact. I've since learned that thinning shears can really mess up the natural texture of curly hair, creating a lot of unwanted volume and frizz. It was a small moment, but it changed how I approach every curly cut since. Has anyone else found that certain tools just don't work for specific hair types, even if they seem like they should?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_lisa8d ago

Look at it from the other side though. A skilled hand can use thinning shears to remove weight without wrecking the curl. It's all about technique and not overdoing it. Calling a tool totally wrong feels like blaming the hammer for a bad nail job.

victor_robinson8d ago

Oh man, that's so true! It makes me think about how a tool can work against the hair's natural structure instead of with it. Thinning shears basically create a bunch of different hair lengths inside the curl, so each piece tries to coil up at its own rate. It's like giving a crowd all different directions at once, total chaos. That's why the frizz happens, the pattern can't stay together. It's wild how the right move is often to leave more hair alone, not cut more of it.

sandra_bennett597d ago

But honestly I've seen it work fine on my own hair. My stylist uses them just at the very ends to soften a blunt cut and it never messed up my waves. Maybe it's more about the person holding the tool and knowing exactly where to cut. If you just hack away with them of course it'll be bad, but that's true for any scissors. A little texturizing can actually help some curl patterns bounce up more by getting rid of weight.

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