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TrimBeardCrest

Five ways of cutting hair

Blades

Almost every argument about which shaver to buy is really an argument about mechanisms nobody has explained. A rotary head, a foil, a single blade, a T-shaped outliner and a slotted rotary tip cut in five different ways, and each one decides what can be done to a particular part of a face. Read the mechanism first and most of the shopping question answers itself.

Clippers, scissors, a straight razor and a numbered set of guard combs arranged flat.
Photograph by Sinval Carvalho

Everything in this section

The five systems

  • Rotary heads

    Three floating caps with cutters turning underneath. Why the geometry suits a curved jaw, why it draws no line, and what happens when hair gets long.

    Rotary

    Rotary heads

  • Foil heads

    A perforated sheet over a cutter moving side to side. What the flat surface gains you, what it gives back on a curve, and why lather changes the feel of a pass.

    Foil

    Foil heads

  • Single-blade hybrids

    One double-sided blade that trims on a comb and shaves without one. What sits between a foil and a trimmer, and what it deliberately does not do.

    Single blade

    Single-blade hybrids

  • T-blade outliners

    A straight cutter set wider than its housing, with a square corner at each end. What an exposed edge is for, and what it does if used for anything else.

    T-blade

    T-blade outliners

  • Dual-edge rotary tips

    The smallest cutting system here: a cylinder turning inside a slotted cap. Why the cap matters more than the edge, and why depth is fixed by design.

    Rotary tip

    Dual-edge rotary tips

Carried through this section

Each caution is written once and gathered here from the pages underneath, and only where most of them carry it. Anything narrower stays where it belongs.

  • StopTwo things mean stopping rather than taking one more pass. Skin that is broken, raised, sore or already inflamed, which is a doctor’s call and not something to draw a blade across. And a line so far out of true that a shorter setting only chases it, which is a barber’s. Neither of them improves by carrying on.
  • StopA shaver or a trimmer belongs to one person. Shaving injures skin at a scale too small to notice, and whatever sits on the blade goes into that injury.
  • NoteReplacement foils, cutters and heads come from the list printed in the appliance’s own documentation. A part that seats is not the same as a part the maker names.