Millimeters, combs and the order of cuts
Lengths
Length is the one decision on this site that only moves in a single direction on the day you make it. Everything here is about knowing what a number leaves standing before you commit to it, taking it off in stages you can stop between, and understanding why a border drawn along a jaw behaves so differently from the hair on either side of it.
Everything in this section
Four pages on length
Guard numbers
What a comb number leaves standing, in millimeters and in eighths of an inch, and why the numbers on your own combs come from your own documentation.
Includes a tool
Guard numbersStubble and short beards
The range where a beard stops being a shave that grew out and starts holding a shape, and what changes about technique on the way through it.
Short lengths
Stubble and short beardsStepping down safely
Going from a long beard to a short one in passes rather than in one cut, with a planner that prints the stops and the arithmetic behind them.
Includes a tool
Stepping down safelyEdges and lines
Where a cheek line and a neckline belong, how both of them drift upward over the months, and the one method available for putting either of them back.
Edges
Edges and lines
Before cutting anything
Only what at least half the pages below carry appears here. Everything narrower stays where it applies, which keeps this from becoming a wall nobody reads.
- 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.