Clipper Cut - Ivan Zoot Clipper Cut Technique

Amy E.: Hello! I'm Amy E. and we're on the Cutting Edge Hairshow with ScissorBoy. This is Ivan Zoot at he works for Andis. There is something special about Ivan. If you buy a Guinness Book of World Records, he is in there three times. Why? Ivan Zoot: I've got the three Guinness World Records for hair cutting and here they are. I've got the Guinness World Record for the fastest hair cut in the world. Amy E.: Fastest. Ivan Zoot: Fastest. Amy E.: How fastest? Ivan Zoot: 55 seconds. Amy E.: A whole hair cut? Ivan Zoot: A whole hair cut just before doing and after by a panel of judges approved by the Guinness; they checked it before, they watched me cutting, they checked it when I was done. 55 blistering seconds is the current one. Amy E.: It's like about as long as we've been on so far. That's incredible. Ivan Zoot: That will be two hair cuts by now. Amy E.: Wow! Okay, what's the next one? Ivan Zoot: The other one, that's the world record for the most professional hair cuts in one hour, straight through perfect hair cuts, judged before doing and after. That's 34 haircuts. The old world record was amazingly 23. Amy E.: Oh my god! Ivan Zoot: 34 haircuts in an hour. Amy E.: 34 hair cuts in one hour. Ivan Zoot: If at the end of the hour when I was done and I had two, I had reclaimed because I broke those originally ten years ago and it's just the time for me to get them back. When I reclaimed my Guinness World Records, I cut hair for 23 more hours down here right there. That's the Guinness World Record for haircuts, nonstop straight through 24 hours without a break, 340 haircuts. Amy E.: You think your eight-hour workday is a long time for standing on your feet. Ivan Zoot: Yeah, you think if you've a long day at work, let's talk about it. That's the way. Amy E.: So what we're going to do today? Ivan Zoot: We're going to cut some hair. We're going to be demonstrating the versatility of clipper cutting. Clipper cutting is one of the greatest things available to today's barber profession for creating contemporary looks. Obviously, I like to focus on speed, efficiency, productivity. We are in a productivity based industry. There is a direct correlation between what you earn and what you can produce. So you know what, we want to maintain quality, we want to maintain customer service but we want to take good care of people and clippers really create some great opportunities. So what we're going to try to do today is talk a little bit about the fast cut. Just because we're talking about clippers doesn't mean it's all going to be guys. Amy E.: What? Ivan Zoot: We are going to show you -- that's right. We're going to show three techniques today. We're going to look at interior layering for top cutting hair. We're going to look at perimeter cutting, things like tapering and longer hair on a female client and we're going to look at trimmer techniques; three things that commonly are associated with the world of barbering and men's hair cutting, we're going to change it out today. Men and women! Amy E.: Women, so you can use clippers on women as well. Ivan Zoot: The clipper doesn't know whose hair you're cutting. Amy E.: The clipper doesn't judge. Ivan Zoot: No, the clipper doesn't know who you're cutting. Amy E.: So we've got our male model, Sean, here and what is interesting about his hair? What you look for? Ivan Zoot: You look like a ScissorGirl or are you still ScissorBoy? Amy E.: Call me Amy E. Ivan Zoot: Amy E. okay. Alright, that's fine. Amy E., here's what we're going to do. I've got my guy in the chair here. He's got some hairs; he is probably got three-and-a-half, maybe four inches worth of hair on top. We want to take down about a third of that with traditional layering. Now, most people are real familiar with the idea of layering interior hair with the scissors; combing sections up, holding them up, cutting off, nothing wrong with that. That's scissor cutting. But what we're doing is clipper cutting. We're going to use our backhand position; the clipper is backwards in our hand. Comb comes out between my thumb and forefinger and the blade gets back at the heel of my hand. I open up my two fingers and I grab my comb. I now have three hands. I've seen this and taught this as three-hand cutting as well. But here is the idea, we're going to take sections of hair, we're going to comb them up, we're going to hold them up and we're going to cut them off. We're going to comb them up, we're going to hold them up and we're going to cut them off. We're going to comb them up, we're going to hold them up and we're going to cut them off. Right across the top of our fingers, we get wonderful sectioning, we get wonderful texture. It's quick and it's easy. Now notice how I did that. The first couple of snips, you saw me take were done perpendicular. That's where the clipper blade is turned 90 degrees or perpendicular to the hair section. The next couple of snips you saw were parallel. What's the difference? Perpendicular cutting allows me to come through thick heavy sections of hair because I'm only unloading two or three teeth along the blade. Look how nice and smooth and easy that is. Amy E.: Wow! Ivan Zoot: Parallel cutting, I use the full face of the blade.