The Ultimate Frugal Haircut

For ultimate frugality in the haircutting realm, I suppose you could keep your hair long, but I really really prefer to keep my hair short. My ultimate frugal haircut is to do it myself! I've been cutting my own hair for a year, and despite moments of frustration, I'm quite pleased about doing it myself.

By short hair, I don't mean chin-length, or some sort of bob. Nope. My hair stays well above my eyebrows, above my ears, and off my neck, and I like it fairly short all over. Two inches would be great, but my DIY cuts come in around three inches all over. Also, I like the hair at the nape of my neck extremely short. When LikeWowMom mentioned cutting her own short hair, I realized there was someone else in the world who did this!

It's taken me a while to figure out how to cut my hair myself. It started with a sharp pair of hospital-origin scissors, my bangs getting in my eyes, and being too busy to get to my latest frugal haircut shop, SuperCuts (10 bucks). Last fall, with a little careful trial and error, I learned to cut my bangs and sideburns. Then I worked out how to more or less trim around my ears. But the rest of my hair kept growing and lengthening, and got to be too heavy for me. Over the months I figured out a way to lightly scissor-texture my hair, which at least kept the whole thing from becoming a "bowl" type of hairstyle.

Finally I figured out a way to scissor-texture my hair quite a lot, which created a really nice shortshort haircut. I even worked out a way to make the sides work out well, above/around my ears. My remaining struggle is how to keep the nape short. One way is to let it grow annoyingly long so I can hold it with my fingers and cut it shorter. The other is to keep on top of it and simply scissor-texture it frequently enough that none of it gets too long. I did have to give up truly shortshort hair; I can't really cut it evenly all over by myself -- as I learned by trying it -- so I texture it until it seems generally short enough. Much safer!

I cut my hair yesterday, including the whole nape thing (I'd let it get too long, but that did make it easy to cut), and today I did a bit of touch-up. It looks quite nice! Better than some of those cheap haircuts I've gotten in the past. If I put some money aside and bought some clippers, I'd be less frustrated about the nape, but still: I'm in charge of my own hair, and not victim to whatever kind of cut the shops I can afford impose on me, grrr. Freedom! Independence! A quite decent haircut for my favorite cost: $0!