Types of Scissors for Women's Hairstyles

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Chris Faircloth, Artistic Director and co-owner of Salon Teez. For Expert Village, this is how to trim women's hair. There are many different types of scissors on the market today. In order to achieve the great results, we should understand the differences of the scissors to choose the right tool for the job. These scissors are a offset pair of scissors. As you can see, the thumb hole is slightly forward from the ring finger hole so the thumb's natural movement is more toward the palm of your hand. Using an offset handle re-creates the movement and allows the scissors to cut hair without a chopping motion that we would typically see if this scissors, if these holes were side by side. It would create more of a quacking or chopping motion. The thumb should be slightly inserted into the thumb hole, not all the way. The ring finger goes as such and then we have a finger rest just in there and the scissors are actually held with these fingers here. The thumb is slightly inserted into the thumb hole so that we create a nice smooth cutting motion. And typically we're only cutting with this particular blade or with the thumb blade itself. We're not creating a quacking motion where as if we put our thumb all the way through, it creates more of a quacking motion like this which gives us a more choppy type of results. By doing this way, we actually get more of a clean, blunt line on the ends of the hair which is what we're looking for when using a pair of shears. We also have a detail pair of shears. This is a two and a half inch blade which also gives us a little bit smaller cutting surface or cutting room but these are great to use for detail areas such as cutting around the ear or tapering the hair or even doing some precision type of cutting, especially in the fringe area so that we don't take off a big chunk of hair, we only have a small cutting surface here. Making sure that our blade is sharp if very important as well as proper care and maintenance of the shear. About once a week or at least, at least once a week if not after every day, we want to make sure that we use a shear oil that we can actually lubricate the blades with. We simply insert a little bit of the oil in between the pivot point and then I like to run a bead just on the blade itself and just work that oil into the pivot and into the shear blade. You'll notice this particular blade has a pivot tension point on it. This is used to control the tension of the blade to either increase or decrease the tension so we get more movement and more action in the blade or if the hair is actually tending to push out of the cutting surface, we can increase the tension which will allow us to cut the hair a little bit more smoothly. If you don't happen to have a pivot tension on your shear, you'll probably have a pivot tension with a flat head type of screw. This can be used with a flat head screwdriver or with a dime to increase or decrease the tension on the shears. By doing that, it ensures that the shears will last for a long period of time and also sharpening every three months actually helps keep the shears in good working order with a good cutting surface."