Afro Taper Fade: The Complete Guide

An afro taper fade keeps the full height of your afro on top and shortens the hair gradually around the edges, at the temples, over the ears and down the nape, stopping at a guard rather than at bare skin. That is the part that matters. A taper always leaves a shadow of hair at the bottom, so there is no hard line where the clippers finished and your own density begins.

Why an afro taper fade beats a skin fade

We cut plenty of skin fades on afro hair and some of them are the best-looking cuts that leave this shop. On a dense, well-shaped top, bare scalp underneath is a contrast nothing else touches, and how the two finishes age is a fair comparison. So this is not a rule, it is a default.

Coils sit at right angles to your head instead of lying along it. Take the sides to the blade and you get bare skin, then almost immediately full density, with nothing in between to soften the join. On straight hair the eye reads that as a blend because the hair lies down over the join. On tight coils it reads as a step.

Then there is week two. Bare skin is back to stubble in three or four days on any head, and bare scalp is what displays it, so a skin fade is only at its best for about ten days. Coily regrowth then returns as a soft fuzz that blurs the fade line rather than following it. A taper does not have that problem, because the bottom of a taper is already a shadow. Growth arrives as slightly more of what was already there.

The last reason is the nape. Coily hair does not come out of the scalp in a straight line, it comes out in a curve, and hair cut flush to the skin can catch on the way back out and turn into the skin rather than clearing it. That is why the back of the neck is where men with coily hair get bumps, and it is why we take the nape of a taper down to a guard and leave it there. If you already get them, start with a pharmacist and see a GP if they do not clear up, because that is past what a barber should be advising on.

The four places to put a taper

"Taper" on its own is not an instruction. It describes how the hair gets shorter, not where, and those are separate decisions that men run together in the chair every week.

Temple taper. The corners only, from the front of your hairline back to about the top of the ear. Everything behind it is left alone. It is the smallest version there is. Ask for it when you want the afro reading as untouched from the side but sharp from the front.

Nape taper. The back only, from the ears down. Nothing at the temples. It is the quiet one, and it keeps a growing afro off your collar.

Burst taper. Fans out around the ear in a semicircle and drops behind it, leaving the back of the head longer. It sits naturally under an afro because it takes the width out at exactly the point where an afro gets widest.

All the way round. The full outline tapered, temples to nape. It is what most men mean by an afro taper fade, and what you get if you ask without saying more.

What to actually say

Barbers work in guard numbers and directions, so give us those.

A workable ask for the full outline: "Take the edges down to a one, blend it up to a three by the time you get to the top of my ear, leave the length on top alone, and follow my hairline rather than squaring it."

Two details are worth naming. The first is the height of the taper, meaning how far up your head the short hair travels before it meets your length. Low keeps almost all your width. Higher gives you shape and takes weight out of a top that has got heavy. The second is whether the taper is scissor-blended into the top or clippered up to it, and on a genuine afro you want scissors doing that join, because clipper work up into dense coils leaves a shelf.

If you are only in for the edges, say the words "do not touch the top". It sounds obvious. It gets forgotten on a busy Saturday, and once the length is gone it is gone.

Pick it out before anyone judges the shape

An afro is not the size it looks. Coily hair compresses against itself, and hair that measures four inches when it is stretched can be sitting at an inch and a half on your head. That gap is exactly where a taper goes wrong.

So the top gets picked out first, from the roots and all the way round, before anyone decides where the taper stops. An afro flattened by a hood or slept on has a different silhouette to the same hair picked out, and a taper height set against the flattened version leaves the line in the wrong place once it springs back up.

It also changes what looks balanced: the fuller the top, the higher the taper can travel without your head reading narrow at the bottom. How the top itself gets cut is a longer subject, and our guide to fades on curly hair covers it. The picking out belongs to the taper, because it sets where the line lands.

The edge up is where hairlines get lost

Afro hairlines are rarely symmetrical. One corner usually sits deeper than the other, there is often a shallow dip above the middle of the forehead, and the growth at the temples tends to be finer than the growth an inch behind it. Trimmers flatten all of that into one straight line in about ninety seconds, and for a week afterwards it looks superb.

What it costs is the hair that had to come off to make the line straight, and then that same hair again a fortnight later, because a drawn edge only stays sharp while you keep cutting back to it. Hold a hard line for a couple of years and it is no longer sitting where it started. The temples go first.

There is a middle setting, and it is what you get here unless you say otherwise. We clean the hairline you already have, take the stragglers off below it, and leave the shape itself alone. It reads as tidy rather than drawn, and it takes nothing off you that will not grow back. If you do want the sharp version, ask each visit, because it is not what we default to. Line ups, and what one involves goes through the technique properly.

How long it holds, and what it costs

Three to four weeks. That is the honest interval for a taper, against about two for a skin fade on the same head, and it is the practical argument for the taper more than anything about how it looks. A taper in week four is a slightly softer taper. A skin fade in week four is a haircut you are apologising for.

A taper fade is £17 here and holds a chair for 40 minutes, which is the time it takes to pick the top out, set the height and blend the join by hand. If you want the beard done in the same sitting it is £9 added to the cut rather than £11 on its own, so the two together come to £26. With six chairs going, the time on your booking is the time you sit down. Reserve a slot, or take your chances as a walk-in.

The mistake worth heading off has nothing to do with technique. In ordinary use "fade" has drifted to mean skin fade, so a man who wants a taper asks for a fade, is given precisely what he asked for, and spends the next three weeks looking at a line he never wanted. Use the word taper. Say how high you want it to travel. If you are unsure of the rest, "not down to the skin" is enough to keep you out of trouble.