 FreeSalonEducation.com invites you to join us every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time for live and interactive classes from your favorite FreeSalon Education Educators. So grab a mannequin, get set up, and make sure to share your results using the hashtag FreeSalonEducation. FSE live starts now! Hey guys this is Matt Beck from FreeSalonEducation.com here with FSE live in the morning. This was an interesting morning. So I'm excited to go over some haircutting stuff with you guys. We don't have a ton of time we have you know a good 45-50 minutes so that should be plenty. What I want to focus on today in this haircutting class we're going to work on the structure of cutting a graduation but I want to go through different techniques with cutting graduation and also work on over direction. So I want to start off with standard sectioning on the mannequin. So what I did was I just took off that if you can show the top view put the GoPro in the ceiling. So the top view so we just took a square off right along the bridal ridge across mid crown and then back over along the bridal ridge. Very symmetrical on the top so we're not really we're not offsetting anything for this haircut it's going to be a real standard graduation. Now as we work through the back here there's a couple of things that when I started cutting graduation that was tricky to me and so I'm going to go through a few different ways that people do that and some mistakes that you can make along the way as you're you're cutting a graduation and a haircut. So we're working in the back the the challenge here is we'll turn the mannequin a little bit. You can see that the head starts off it's rounded up here so so the elevation is pretty simple within this back area nothing's very uncomfortable so it's pretty easy to cut but then as we work as around the occipital bone and the neck the nape of the neck tips in tilts in whatever as it goes in that's where it gets uncomfortable and we're trying to like weave in and out of the sectioning. So I want to show you guys a couple things that I do it makes it more comfortable for me. So we're going to start off I took a section right down center back clean that up a little bit and what I'm going to do is I don't want to work in too big a section so if we were going to cut this one length I wouldn't want to take a big section let's say take it from the occipital bone down and just cut all this hair because if you try to cut too much hair you're going to start pushing hair and that's going to lead to an unsuccessful result as well. So you want to work in small sections so we're going to take about an inch wide section through the back and we're going to work horizontally and the reason I like to work horizontally in the back in the beginning of the haircut as well is because that's just more comfortable for me from a hand position standpoint. So I'm going to slide that clip up and away and I'm going to take another horizontal line in the back and when I first start off the back I really like to work both sides at the same time because that's going to allow me to make sure that the haircut stays balanced and it just works better for me but if you guys like to do one side first then go back to the other you can do that as well. So we've got our first horizontal line in the back so what I'm going to do I'm going to turn the head a little bit mostly so you guys can see more of a body position standpoint rather than the actual cut. So I'm going to take my comb and I want to cut this at one length first and the reason I'm going to do that at one length is because it's not actually going to be a one length and we've talked about this before because the head is curving in so if I cut this all flat here we're going to have different levels of graduation starting already. So we're going to start off I'm going to use my comb as a guide and I'm going to cut my first line. Now I'm just going to follow that comb across and then to clean it up just use the tip of my scissor and work through just for any like straggling hairs that are going through there. Again it's the tip of my scissor clean up the line. Now when I work backhand I don't always like to put my comb in here because then it gets a little a little too scrunched I guess so I'm going to go through and just freehand along the edge and line there. So comb that down again using the tip of my scissor just to clean up the line and using that tip of the scissor at about a 45 degree angle works pretty well. So I mean straight up and down is not going to take much out so if you just angle it a little bit you can get a nice clean line in there. Now I'm going to take my next section. My next section is going to be nice and small again and like I said I'm going to show you guys what the difference between cutting this vertically and what it would be cutting it horizontally. So let's get this section out and then. Hey Matt something I just want to point out with that I just remembered that you taught me not that long ago. Yeah while you're section or creating your section the direction that you're combing all of the hair before you do it to make sure that you get a nice clean section. I'm just thinking about that because I just had to revisit that with someone the other day. Okay. Showing what a difference that makes having the hair go in the direction before you try to create this section rather than combing it all down and trying it section. Okay I know you're saying yeah. So as we're basically if we're going to take a parting what Brian's saying and stuff that we've worked on before if I was going to part vertically I'm going to comb the hair or let's just say obviously vertically it's easy but it's because we're combing the hair down but if we wanted to take a diagonal back parting what I would do is comb that hair exactly in the direction I want to take that parting and then when I go through to take take my section it's nice and clean every time. So same thing horizontally we're going to comb the hair that way then take the section so it'll be a few combs over then take the section. Now the reason I'm going to go in horizontally instead of vertically and this is something that I learned a long time ago is if we're working vertically and let's say I take this section here it's pretty simple so it's pretty simple to take your first section here comb it out and cut so this side is pretty easy for me but as soon as I move to the other side and we're combing and I'm holding my fingers in a downward position this way to keep that same angle because my elbow has to go so high in the air and it just wants to drop the whole time it's not comfortable so I get an inconsistent result within my graduation so one side will be a little bit longer than the other and I think that happens with a lot of people so if I work horizontally the only thing I have to worry about is when I take my section or my parting there I only have to worry about how much I elevate this way so I need to make sure I stay consistent within this elevation but it's comfortable so I'm like this the entire time as opposed to sometimes being like this and sometimes being like this so it just works better for me and that's why I like I work horizontally usually through the throughout the base till I get to the occipital bone and then when I'm working on top of the head then I don't mind moving to vertical just depending on what haircut I'm looking to achieve so I'm gonna start off on the left side sad you tell me if you can see that so I just want to grab a little bit of the old hair that we had the guide man if you want to move the mannequin a little bit here actually I think we might be good you know what if I come over here I'm gonna take a little bit less hair you really want to make sure you see the guideline now I don't want to take too much of this hair some people will scoop this all up here to cut but what you're doing is you're stretching all that hair from the bottom so your guideline is right away going to be way too short for the graduation you're you're basically gonna start layering it when you didn't want to so I want to make sure I don't take too much hair I don't put too much in my hand and then I'm gonna bring this out horizontally here find your guide back a little bit to your left we can see your hand we can see your scissors but we can't see the actual section here alright let's go back to this side we'll figure it out one of these days this is the beauty about not doing it live because you can make adjustments so we're working we worked horizontally and now as I'm moving it's gonna be a slight diagonal forward so just a just a little shift in the cut this way because we're really just following that head shape as well so right away we start building up a nice little graduation in there so I'll bring down the rest of that bit that I had there and just really during this you want to focus on your elevation here because you need that to stay consistent and we'll go through and cross check it at the end but you really want to make sure that you're focused on that elevation so you don't build up too much weight or too little weight whatever you're looking to go for as you're working with your elevation do you want to kind of maybe just touch on what to expect with this type of haircut as far as how high you lift it versus how low you keep your elevation well so that's so that when working horizontally yeah so that's gonna change throughout the haircut depending on the head shape and the density so let's say that we have somebody that comes in that has a high density of hair as I'm working through here maybe I don't want the bottom to be so thick so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna elevate it higher at this point so we might have the elevation all the way up here throughout this part of the haircut and then when we get to the top start dropping it down more it really just depends on where you want to shift that weight to I think people get so caught up in building the line perfectly like this you know like so they want to see that crisp line but really that line could shift and move depending on the density of the hair and where we want the majority of the weight to sit right now because my elevation is here that's where I want that weight to sit and you can see that that's what's happening it's building up right there but then all of this hair that I'm gonna bring down to this point I don't necessarily want all the weight from this hair to sit here I might want to sit a little bit higher so my elevation is gonna shift with each panel that I take down so you can see how that's kind of coming into place because we're over directing it slightly back you're getting a little bit of that a-line kind of feel to it that can be determined on how much you shift back and how much weight weight you want to push to the front and length as well so now we're gonna go through take down another section here another panel we're combing it nice and tight over so you want all those little hairs to get out of the way so you can stay nice and clean through the haircut once I finish the back then we'll go back through and we'll cross check it as well so really just working those little hairs over and then clipping it away so now I could move vertically because now this is pretty comfortable no matter where I'm at but I'm gonna stick to horizontal through this section and then we'll work vertical on the next so I'm gonna grab right out of the center a bit more of the guide there so my elevation is even higher at this point because like I said I don't want all the weight sitting down at the bottom so we're gonna bring up that elevation you can see how it starts to shift that weight up a little bit move the mannequin now we're working on our diagonal forward because now I'm wrapping around towards the ear there's less density there so I can drop my elevation a little bit towards this part of right behind the ear because this is really thick and then this gets skinnier so I don't want to have it the elevation super high through that whole part because what's gonna happen is this will be too weak in the line that we're trying to create in there so you can see it started to shift that weight up so now it's sitting a little bit higher nice and soft and we'll work this section here moving into that diagonal forward again so now I'm gonna comb everything down because I'm gonna start working vertically now throughout the haircut so I'll comb all of this down we only have about two inches left to work with and I'm gonna be working on top of my fingers at this point so I'm gonna part the hair a little bit find a clean section straight down vertical so now the thing I like about working vertically is I can really see exactly how much weight I want to leave on this so even if we wanted to cut and round this off we could I'm gonna leave a little bit of that weight on there so I'm gonna come out to our guide and then I'm just gonna work a line straight along my fingers so you'll see there's gonna be a buildup of weight from this point of the head because this is obviously curved and higher here so we're gonna have a slight buildup of weight but we want that to kind of finish off our graduation so I'll keep working that same angle throughout the back so I'll just take a little bit of what I just cut so we're working with a traveling guide the traveling guide is gonna give us a nice foundation and shape if you over direct something too far as it starts to get heavier you you lose that structure a little bit so but again now that we're working towards the ear the density changes so I don't want to over direct it all the way I don't want to over direct it too much or I don't want to not over direct it because I need that weight to land in the corner there so now as we get to the corner of the head here we're gonna start to just over direct everything straight back not to the center back but just straight back to build up a little extra weight if you can see that on there but you can see how starting to get heavier now that we're over directing it into that corner so now the last little bit right behind the ear is also gonna be over directed straight back and cut at our guideline you see that that now here's one thing you're gonna see that this hair is shorter than that that's okay that doesn't mean you need to cut all that off which I think a lot of people just jump to doing that I like having that little bit of a disconnection because that starts to bring in that line if you can see that so just because that hair is shorter under there it doesn't mean you need to cut it you can always clean it in the dry cut but not everything needs to be connected all the time so now we're gonna work through the other side we'll take a small bit from our guideline staying on the same side of the head but the only difference now is I'm combing the hair towards myself because you always want to keep a consistency with how you comb the hair to the guide so when we were working on the left side I was pushing the hair to the guide and now I'm pulling the hair to the guide just so that we stay consistent with that we're gonna comb it down again just like the other side this is traveling and it's traveling until we get to that corner and then we over direct back everything over directed straight back and we start to build that forward wait line so you can see it's not too heavy of a graduation what I like is that we work through it shifting our elevation to take out some of the density through the haircut but then you still get the volume and the layering sort of throughout the hair I guess it's not layering technically but you can see all that movement and texture in there but it's still nice and sleek so somebody that had a higher density of hair it would be just as easy to work through it with higher elevation to lighten up the haircut so you don't get that big kind of fat bob at the bottom if you don't want it if you want it's a different story so what I want to do now is go through real quick comb everything over spray your hair down a little bit so everybody quiet on there or they are you guys typing a lot of people just watching enjoying we got people skipping classes to watch this people skipping fire drills nice so working diagonal back you could see as I work through it so there's the line that we're looking for and that's our cross checking so we were working horizontally pretty much gonna work vertically but at a diagonal is come more comfortable so you can do that as well so we're just gonna work through here a diagonal back I'm just gonna check a couple spots if I see something crazy there's our disconnection so I don't want to cut that off that might be a place where sometimes people are cross-checking and they see something they cut it off and it completely changes the haircut so you don't want to do that either so just as you're working through be be aware of your disconnection but you can see that line is pretty good it's a little bit of a round to it that's because of the shift in the elevation so I think we're pretty good with that part of the haircut so now I want to work into the sides and what we're gonna do with this with these classes and how they work is I'm gonna cut the sides of this haircut hopefully you guys have picked up quite a few tips within the graduation and all of that and how we worked it and then next the next time I cut hair which will be in a couple weeks we're gonna go through and we're gonna do dry hair cutting and detailing on this same mannequin so we'll smooth it out and do all of that so that you guys don't have to sit through the blow dry and also so these classes aren't super long and you can kind of take those tips try them out and then work on the dry cutting later so we could do a couple things here depending on the look that your guest wants you could either keep over directing everything back to that point and really build that a line feel to it with also removing some weight or you could square off the graduation which is something that I like to do and we'll do that because I think at this point a lot of people know how to just over direct hair but I want to cut a nice square feel to it so like I said we pushed that weight into the corner but that doesn't mean that we need to keep it there it just means I wanted to push weight there to have a nice solid foundation for going in later and cutting the shape that I want so if I didn't push that extra weight there I'd really have nothing to cut so I'm gonna comb this up and out of the way I don't want to cut it all at the same time again that's what has to do with pushing the hair too much so we'll comb the hair down turn so I'm gonna comb the hair down using the wide teeth of my comb so there's not too much tension in it a lot of times they'll have their ear depending on how their ear sits on their head it might kind of push this hair out a little bit and that's fine everybody says tap on the ear I just think if you comb it lightly over the ear it works just as well so now what we're gonna do is come across here remove that corner we're just gonna work a nice square line in the haircut now I want to soften this the rest of the hair that's gonna come over top of this so I don't want to cut all of that hair just square at the bottom I'm gonna have a slight bit of elevation to it so we'll break this in half and I'll grab a little bit of that hair to work as a guide and I'm gonna just slightly elevate the hair and work that line a little bit more so then it falls nice and soft rather than having just kind of a harsh floppy bottom on the haircut break this in half slight elevation working square last little bit now I hold the hair from the bottom into this for my guideline because it's too far away at this point so just grab a little bit of that old hair and use that as your guide make sure you're not following the round of the head here it is gonna be a slight over direction back so then you guys can see how it tucks nice right around the chin length instead of it just being a super heavy feel to the haircut knock myself out mad I don't remember someone's asking are you going to Orlando yes yeah I'll be in Orlando we're doing the same thing in Orlando that we've done in all the shows so that's kind of the goal to end up end this year's hair show run so we'll be interviewing some of the artists there cool cool and then I'm done being an interviewer after that well all right I'll do it not completely done but I'd like to do some hair all right same thing working across with just a little bit of that hair get that line moving and somebody's probably gonna ask how do you know that both sides are even well hopefully if I did my haircut correctly they are even this is where you pray to the hair gods that you didn't mess it up but yeah if you check it with balance and you're doing all of your cross-checking and all that it really should be the same pretty much on both sides and if you need to make it shouldn't be too extreme if the parents so you could go through and just make some minor adjustments but everybody's head is a little bit different so you're not gonna necessarily be symmetrical on both sides so just working square cross it's funny Justin you laughing chuckling I was just referred to as J man J man I enjoy these classes in the morning because it was much less stressful getting ready for everything because everyone's a lot quieter because it's early as much mayhem in the background you know I've calmed my road rage that's pretty even success all right so what we're gonna do is in two weeks we're going to I'm gonna leave this top out because I like to cut the top of a graduation dry for the most part I'm not saying I do that all the time but for next week we're going to because we're gonna focus on dry hair cutting so all of this will be smoothed out whoa she's tired so all of this will be smoothed out but you can see with having that square section it gives us a lot of fun to kind of go through and create texture really just give this haircut its own unique feel because there's hair all around it that's long so we can go through and do all kinds of dry cutting techniques we'll cut probably a fringe in there in a couple weeks when we get back here and do it so next week I believe we have Draya coming in yeah yeah so Draya is going to do a graduate or not a graduation that's the brain Draya is gonna do some long hair so so I'm really excited to see that like formal styling long hair I'm just clearing that up because somebody did request that we do a long hair cut yeah okay yeah we're gonna do a long haircut as well if I have any mannequins left long hair I can model for that they keep doing it I know we keep taking them down I'm like oh there's my really nice Bahlia's one and now she's got a Bob well here's the thing you have like when you do like I did this shag haircut which was pretty long I mean they're only so long they're only this long so we do have some really long hair mannequins though which we could cut into give them a nice haircut yeah some fun stuff so we'll do a long haircut for you guys and if you have any other questions post them in the comments and or video requests or anything because we're doing these videos every week every Wednesday morning now at 10 a.m. so all you guys have to do is log in and join us every Wednesday morning this seems to work better we have splitting hairs coming up tonight which is our live video podcast that'll be at 7 30 p.m. which it seems to be very fun at night so it's the end of our day we get to talk hair and kind of relax instead of stressing and getting the class together and all that so I thank you guys so much for watching this video I hope that these tips help you it's definitely these are little things little adjustments that I've made when I cut a graduation that I've really helped because I think if you get too stuck in I have to cut the whole thing vertically or you know we're worrying about where your elbows at if you just move horizontal and just focus on your elevation this way and you can get those perfect lines in the haircut and then work vertically towards the top you'll be more comfortable and it should work out good so is there any other questions on there anything yeah I think we're pretty good all right well everyone enjoy your salon day thank you for watching the video make sure you subscribe to us here on YouTube and share it with your friends we love that and that's pretty much it thanks to Bercato products for sponsoring videos and Mizutani scissors which is what we use today the DB 20 scissor I love so you can get those on shopfse.com but you guys have a fantastic day and we'll see you guys on the next video thanks