 Hey everybody, I'm Andrew Carruthers, education director for Samvia. We're going to talk about fringe specifically about what happens with elevation in this area of the head that we like to call the fringe or the banks. So for the sake of efficiency, let's think about how elevation affects this area. First things first, let's grab a pair of shears. We're going to use this one. This is the six and three quarter inch streamline shear from Samvia. When you're cutting fringe, you know, just on kind of a side note, one of the, the really important things is to look for natural growth. So the first thing that we did here is to actually cut the hair or blow dry the hair into its natural fall. And we do that by wrap drying the hair. If she's got really strong growth patterns, you can use a comb to do that. And you use your comb to kind of press down into the head while it's wet as you're blow drying back and forth. And that really helps to press out any kind of growth patterns that might be in the hair they're going to get in the way of the fringe. The next question usually is, well, how far back do I take the fringe? That's a really tough question to answer because number one, it has to do with density, of course, because if she's got a ponytail this big around and you take your fringe from all the way back at the high point of the head, she's going to have a shelf this thick that you're going to spend a lot of time trying to work through, but then also proportion is really important. When we look at the face shape, there's also kind of a rule of thirds. It's from the hairline to the bridge of the nose, bridge of the nose, tip of the lip, tip of the lip to the chin here. And those thirds, the goal is to have them be balanced. So a lot of people say, like, well, it's good to put a fringe on someone with a very long forehead, which we'd probably tend to agree. Here's the issue. If you take your fringe super far back on someone that also has a very long forehead, this dimension becomes really extended. So trying to keep the fringe section slightly farther forward on someone that has a longer forehead is actually going to help with your balance too. So take that into consideration as well. The width of the fringe definitely is about face shape as well. This is pretty common sense stuff, right? If they have a very wide face, we don't want to take that fringe super wide on them because that's just going to make it feel wider. If they have a very narrow face, of course, we don't want to create this little curtain fringe that's super closed in because that's going to make them feel more tall and narrow. So just kind of use your common sense when you start to think about the design factor. Once you have that set in, then we have to think about how do we get to our end result the most efficiently? If I want a very heavy fringe, cutting our fringe at low elevation is a great idea. If I come here and I cut fringe very hard and solid, just a big heavy blunt line, well, that's nice and crooked. It's blunt and heavy, right? Because all of this hair is piling up right down here. Now, don't just think of it from the front view because our guests are seen from multiple angles. Also look at it from the profile because from the profile, the shape that you're going to have is going to be very shelfy here. So it's going to be more flat, flat, flat, and then you're going to build density towards here. So it's all about where you want the weight to sit. So what if I don't want it to be heavy? Then we would use the elements of elevation. If I take the hair and I elevate, we refer to this as 90 degrees horizontal, and really what we're saying is just horizontal parallel with the floor. If we look at the head shape itself here, it's closer to my fingers. And at the top of the head, it's farther away from my fingers. So where's the shortest point going to be at the bottom, right? So for some of you, you might think, oh, well, I'm elevating it up and this should be layered hair. It's actually not. It's graduated hair because it's going from short at the bottom to longer at the top. So if you want to take weight away from the perimeter, let's start to build weight up and away from that perimeter, then that elevation, you can see the difference in that center compared to the sides, see how now that bottom edge is very lean, but it's very quickly leaving weight here. Now, let me do that across the entire fringe area, and you'll be able to see that the profile view has changed quite significantly too. And we're just cutting blunt mainly so that you'll see the most true end result. The profile is much, much different now because it's very collapsed in here and it creates a very round sort of shape through the middle area because we're building weight up and away from the face there. So let's say we want to get rid of that weight. Then we may want to elevate even more. So now let's cut this again, but let's really start to elevate at a very high elevation. So let's cut a nice strong perimeter first, and this will become a nice guide for us. So we'll start there because we want to keep this at a higher elevation. It's going to be easier to work in sections. If I take the whole thing and compress it, it's not going to have even elevation. So we have that guide from the front. Now we'll elevate to 90. There's that little guide from the front. So we'll follow that. I'll give you a profile view so you can see the elevation. You'll see we're 90 degrees from her scalp. So we're using kind of that true state board definition of 90 degrees. There's the guide from below. But now you're really starting to see a shift in that density. We're getting a very, very soft on the ends, but now look at the profile view. You'll actually see that it's starting to flatten out on the forehead. At low elevation, the weight kind of distributes like this. So it comes down more to a shelf. So we have that thickness at the perimeter. When we went to higher elevation, that 90 degrees horizontal, the weight went like that. So it actually built almost a very round shape from the profile now because it's layered and it's fairly collapsed on the weight. There's not a buildup of weight here. Now it's getting a very lean profile, almost more of a vertical profile. So you can see between those three changes, it's not just what happens here. It's also what happens here. That's really important. So take that into consideration. Plus texture is a big trend currently. Everything has got like texture and movement to it in the hair. So cutting something super heavy and blunt and then spending all this time coming through and deep point cutting, deep point cutting and then picking up our blending shear and coming in and trying to take weight out, take weight out. That's a lot of extra steps by layering the hair first. We've already taken weight away and created. Look at how much texture and movement is already on the surface of that haircut without actually doing any kind of texture rising. So now at this point, there's very little detail work that's going to have to go into this fringe, just maybe some notching into it to get some separation. You could come in and just do a little bit of surface cutting. If you wanted to get some separation on the surface, whatever you wanted to do to detail it, but there's going to be a lot less times that the shear is going to have to reconnect with that piece of hair to get your end result. Think about this the next time you cut your fringe, think about what's that end result you want, not just visually from the front, but also turn them to the side and look at the profile of you to see what kind of dimension you want here in relationship with balance with the face. What would you do if they already have bangs, but they feel like it's too heavy, not at the ends, but at the root? So I work for a company called Samvia, if you haven't heard of us and we do produce shears, really focused on ergonomics. We feel very high value shears for the price points. This year is super unique and don't worry, I'm not going to cut myself. This actually isn't a blade. It's a polished surface. So the only thing that does the cutting is the teeth on this particular blending shear. So what happens is as you're closing the shear, the teeth are cutting as the hair is slipping forward on that polished blade. So traditionally, if your blending shear, you know, holds the hair really well and cuts really blunt, you have kind of these little divot marks, these little lines from the teeth that can happen. So we call this the invisible end shear because as the hair is sliding forward, because it's being cut just with the teeth, it creates these little scalloped edges short to long, short to long. So what's really cool about this is you can be really aggressive and you're not going to see a line in the hair because it cuts that short to long, short to long. So this is the shear for this kind of work because weight, that heaviness, typically doesn't actually live at the ends. It lives deep within the hair, it lives in that base and mid shaft of the hair. That's where density is. So this is what we would suggest. Come back in, in very organized sections. Place the blending shear at a diagonal. Now, if your blending shear is pretty aggressive, this wouldn't be the recommendation, honestly. This one is very soft and it's not going to take a ton of hair away, so you can see I'm pretty close to the scalp and I'm going to come through, close and slide through. I'm not going to come back to that section again. This is why it's so important to become organized. Individual little tiny pieces of hair do not cause sprouting. And here's the proof. You are constantly regrowing hair. Your hair is falling out and regrowing all the time. So there's already tiny little bits of hair at your scalp all over the place. What creates that sprouty feeling is if you come in and you do that, if I did it one more time and maybe put a bundle of like 30 hairs right next to them that are that short, that's what's going to create that sproutiness. A shear like this will take 80 bitty little tiny hairs away so that you don't risk getting that sproutiness. Now, here's what I know a lot of you are asking is, well, I don't have that shear, so how do I do this? If you take the blade of your shear and you actually do a very, very fine weave through the surface, then close. That will turn your blending shear that maybe is a little bit more aggressive into something that's closer to this, very, very soft. So what that is doing is it's actually taking bulk away from the interior of the hair. So this is why it's so important to work in sections. Even go ahead and take a clip and place it on that section so that you know you're not going to touch it again and let that next section down. I don't want to dig into that previously cut section. So I'm just going to come to the surface because we're getting up onto the upper surface. If you don't again have a shear like this, you may want to come a little farther into the mid strand now because this is very soft and I'm still going to have hair over top of it. I'm still going to go in pretty close to the scout. And then the last section really shouldn't need much because this section just should be a soft piece that this now can become the veil too. So just in case you did maybe get a little too aggressive on some point, one little point within that hair or that process, you still have this final veil that can lay over that will mask that if you got a little too aggressive. If you lay this down and it still feels heavy, we would just recommend that you start a little farther down the strand and then come through, be very gentle and just remember a little bit of weight from that surface again. The mistake that most of us make honestly with with your exact question with how do you remove that density is that we tend to stay on the ends. We'll pick up the section and we'll come here and we'll start doing this. Point cutting point cutting addresses the weight and density here towards the ends of the hair. And the challenge with this is it will actually make the rest of the hair look thicker. If you're looking to create something or remove actual weight, you need to get interior inside the hair. Hope that helps. All right, guys. Well, I think that's about it for me. I'm going to shut up and let Matt have his studio back and Sam and I both we want to send a huge shout out to free salon education and to Matt for having us here. We've we've had a spectacular time here. But great playing with you guys that I'll see you soon.