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Throughout my time cutting hair, I have always admired the art of a skin fade because there is truly no other haircut that can transform someone the way a 'fresh' skin fade does. Whether you like to dabble with hair or are just starting with your hair cutting journey, I have made this 5-step guide to help teach you the easiest and best way to giving a fresh skin fade.
First things first, we begin our fade by debulking the clients hair. Depending on how long our clients hair is, sometimes you will get clients with relatively short hair that do not need much debulking. to be more specific, these are clients who had a haircut recently and are just coming in for a maintenance fade. if that is the case then you can skip this step and jump right into the step 2. Otherwise for the debulking step, grab a number 2 clipper and make sure to have your guard open and begin by trimming all the hair along the sides of the clients head gently. Make sure you are flicking outwards towards the top part of the sides where your client's hair top parts with the sides. By flicking outwards we are ensuring the sides are blended in with the top without making it look like an undercut.
After we are done debulking, we begin with setting our guideline. Before we set our guideline we have to make sure we know what type of fade our client wants. if it is a low skin fade, then we begin by setting our guideline by trimming to a 0 relatively low just above the ear and follow through with the line all the way to the other side. if it is a mid skin fade, then we start by setting our guideline halfway at the height of the client's c-cup and follow through with the line until we get to the other side of the clients hair. Lastly, if it is a high skin fade we start by making our guideline just a little past the half-way mark of the clients c-cup and follow through with the line until we get to the other side as well.
After we have figured out what kind of fade our client wants and we set our guideline, we begin by blending the top part of the sides with the debulked portion. I recommend using a open guard 1.5 clipper to start and flicking outwards near the top of the fade and working your way down to a number 1 closed guard. By doing this, our client's hair will be faded a lot quicker once we get rid of our guideline.
After completing step 3, we are ready to get rid of our initial guideline and bring the fade to life! This step may be intimidating to many, however, all of it is based on how you hold the clipper and the way you flick out. Firstly, we begin by taking our trimmer with no clipper open the guard all the way and flick outwards towards the guideline. The key here is to blend the top part of our guideline with the already blended top portion which we completed from the earlier step. after we are done flicking outwards with our clipper open all the way, we notice our guideline is still somewhat visible. For this next part, we want to get rid of our somewhat visible guideline by fading out the guideline with a fully closed guard and only use the corners of the trimmer. Lastly, after the guideline has been completely faded out, take a moment and use a 0.5 clipper and just do some final touches by ensuring the guideline region is properly blended in with the rest of the hair to give that extra 'blurry' fade effect. Make sure you are alternating between an open and close guard for this part to ensure everything fades in and no lines are left.
Once we have done our final touches in blending the hair and bringing the fade to life, we are ready for the best part of the haircut and that is the line up! It is probably the simplest and most straightforward step of this guide, we begin by taking our detailing trimmer that we used in step 2 (I prefer the sharpness of my Babyliss Pro trimmer) and we line up the fade by following our client's c cup and then just boxing out the top portion of the fade. If asked for by the client, you can also line up the client's hairline by starting in the middle of their hairline and lining up just a tiny bit past where their hairline meets.
And just like that you have officially completed a fresh skin fade! Hopefully you have learned a new and easier way to doing what many may think is an intimidating haircut to learn. As always for many, it will take some time and practice before you perfect and master the craft of giving a skin fade, however, we hope our guide at least helps you learn an easier technique to doing a skin fade and making your life easier when cutting hair!