Getting Into the Tao of Hair

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The most important thing about cutting hair is understanding its tao. When you build on land, you can go in with bulldozers, push down the hills, tear up the trees and throw up anything you want: Skyscraper, parking lot, mausoleum. Or you can look at the land, live on it, walk over it, then gradually come to understand its tao and build your building to be part of what's already there.

Similarly, by thinking of hair as something akin to dynel or nylon, starting with a preconceived notion of what it should look like, you can—by cutting, setting, spraying, etc.—get hair to do anything you can dream up. I'm not down on that kind of trip as theatrics but as a way of life I find it a bit obnoxious. What interests me in all of this is the understanding that comes when you look at hair, feel it, comb it, watch it move, then gradually begin to cut, with respect.

The first thing you learn is that hair is not a static sculpture. It's more like, to continue the art analogy, a mobile. Hair is meant to move. It's got to be cut that way. The best way to begin thinking your way into the hair is to cut it moving. Don't just stick your scissors in, line them up like daddy on the golf course getting ready for a putt and SNIP. Instead, start the hair moving, across the line it needs thinning.

You do this by combing up under it with the comb in your left hand. As the hair fans, you move the scissors (in your right hand) into it, cutting lightly as you go. This technique is terribly hard to describe on paper, relatively easy to pick up from watching.

Another useful thing to do is have your friend (or victim, depending on how experienced you are) shake his head frequently during the hair cut. You can then see how the hair falls, naturally, when left to itself.

The curlier hair is, the easier it is to cut. With intensely thick and curly hair, it's impossible to make a mistake:Your errors get lost immediately in the curls. Fine, straight hair is the most difficult to cut. The slightest hesitation of movement on your part will cause a blur in the line that will show forever.

Hair wet, or very dirty or oily, does not look like hair clean. If you can get straight, thin hair to blend wet, it will look outasight clean and dry, as the additional "fluff" covers mistakes. For the same reason, always cut wet hair somewhat longer than you want it. The fluff will add body, but decrease length.

Before I sign off here, I've got a few more comments I hope are of some interest.

The current teenage boy hair style of eyebrow-length bangs swept to one side strikes me as about the most ridiculous thing to come down the pike since the Mohican. Not only is this style attempted by every male adolescent in the Boston area, whether or not his particular head of hair grows that way, but it is giving rise to an entire generation with a peculiar twitch of the head which comes from tossing their hair out of their eyes nine million times a day.

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