How to Ask for a Haircut: What to Say

How to ask for a haircut comes down to four decisions, said in roughly this order: how much length stays on top, how short the sides go and how high that shortness climbs, what happens at the neckline, and whether the hairline gets lined up or left alone. Give a barber those four and he can cut what is in your head. Say "just a trim, tidy it up" and you have handed the decision to a man who has never seen your hair before.

Here is the whole conversation, in the order we ask about it.

The four decisions

The top. Say it as a measurement, not an adjective. "Take an inch off" or "leave about two inches" or "half of what is there now". Hold your fingers apart if it is easier, we do it back at you all day. Short means eight millimetres to one man and three inches to the next, and the two of you will both say it with total confidence.

The sides. A guard number, and where you want the shortness to stop climbing. Low, mid and high describe the height of the fade line on the side of your head, not how short the hair is at the bottom. A high skin fade and a low skin fade are both bare at the bottom; one carries the change up past the temple and one keeps it near the ear. Whether that bottom point is bare skin or a grade one is a separate decision from the height, and that choice matters more for how long the cut holds than anything else you pick. If numbers are not your thing, our guide to clipper guard lengths puts each one in millimetres.

The neckline. Square, rounded, or natural. This is the part of your haircut you will never see and other people see constantly. Square looks sharpest on the day and grows into a visible block within a fortnight. Natural, which means tapered out with no hard edge, is softer walking out and stays tidy the longest. If you go four or five weeks between cuts, take the natural one.

The edges. Lined up at the front, or left soft. Same question at the temples. If your hairline is going back, a hard line drawn across it makes a border around exactly the thing you would rather nobody measured, and we will usually say so and suggest leaving it natural.

How to ask for a haircut in one sentence

Number, top, neckline. In that order, it comes out as one sentence and it covers everything a barber needs to start.

"Two on the sides, blended up, scissors on top and take about an inch off, natural neckline."

"Skin fade up to the temple, keep the length on top, square the back."

"Same as it is now, just shorter. About a third off all over, keep the shape, and tidy the neck."

If you only remember one piece of this, make it the number and the neckline. Those two are the hardest to undo and the ones men most often leave to chance.

A photo is useful, just not as proof

Bring two or three, not one. One picture of a man with different hair to yours is a wish. Three pictures have something in common, and that something is usually the thing you actually want, whether or not you could name it.

What we look at in a photo is not the style. It is whether the hair in it grows anything like yours: how dense it is, which way it falls at the front, where his hairline sits. A cut is mostly the hair it is cut into. If the man in the photo has thick straight hair sitting flat and yours is fine with a cowlick above the left eye, the shape in that picture is going to do something else entirely on you, and it is better that you hear that before we start rather than after.

Two things that make a photo far more useful. Include one taken from behind if you can find one, because the back is the half of the haircut you never inspect and never describe. And say which bit you are pointing at. Half the time a man shows us a photo and means the length on top only, while the sides in it are nothing like what he wants.

Words that mean something else in a barbershop

Trim is the big one. To most men it means "keep it exactly as it is, just fresh". To a barber it is any amount of hair from a millimetre upwards. Put a number on it.

Thin it out usually gets read as texturising, which is thinning shears or a razor taking weight out from underneath. On thick hair that is right. On fine hair it is the opposite of what you want, because removing weight from hair that has none makes it look sparser. If your hair is fine and feels heavy, you want less length, not less weight.

Layers on a men's cut normally means the top being cut at different lengths so it moves instead of sitting as one block. Ask for it by what you want it to do: more movement, less bulk, more height at the front.

Clean it up means whatever the barber decides it means. It is the phrase most likely to end with more gone than you expected.

Tidy the beard and shape the beard are different jobs. Tidy is the strays and the neckline. Shape changes the outline of the beard on your face, and that is a decision worth saying out loud.

The most useful sentence you can say

"What I did not like about the last one was..."

Finish that sentence and you save both of us ten minutes. The sides were fine but the back had a shelf in it. The fringe came out shorter than you wanted. It looked good for a week and then went shapeless. It never sits right on the crown. Every one of those tells us more than a style name does, because it points at a specific thing to do differently rather than a look to aim at.

Worth adding: how long ago the last cut was, and whether you are growing it out or keeping it where it is. A man growing his hair out needs the opposite instruction to a man maintaining it, and both of them say "just a tidy up".

Speak up while it is happening, not at the end

The mirror at the end is too late to be a decision. It is a verdict.

Ten seconds after the clippers go on, you can still ask for shorter, longer, higher, softer. Every one of those is a small correction at that point. Twenty minutes later the same request means growing hair back, and that takes three weeks whatever anyone tells you.

So look up early. If we have taken a first pass at the sides and it is not what you pictured, say it right then. Ask to see the back before the neckline gets finished rather than after, while it can still be squared or softened. Nobody in this shop takes it personally. There are six chairs running at once in here and every barber in them would rather stop for ten seconds than hand you a haircut you are quietly unhappy with for the next month.

A haircut here is £15 and holds the chair for half an hour, and a decent slice of that half hour exists so this conversation can happen properly rather than over the noise of the clippers.

Next time you get a cut you like, write down what was said before it: the number, the length off the top, the neckline. Three words in your phone. That note is worth more than any photo, because it is the only description of your hair that was written by someone who has actually seen it. Book a chair and bring it with you, or come in without one and we will work it out together and you can walk out with the note.