How to Practice Hair Sectioning Without Getting Lost
New students are eager to get cutting but, learning sectioning is the first step in creating order. If the sections aren’t clean, it’s difficult to read the work and more importantly, it’s difficult to replicate it, and it’s easier to mess it up. Clean sectioning isn’t just part of the prep, it’s part of the technique. It’s the line that helps create shape and helps maintain balance on both sides and keeps the fingers from guessing. For this reason, time should be spent on sectioning the hair before even the scissors or brush is used.
Using a mannequin head or a model with dry hair and a tail comb and clips that don’t slip, don’t attempt to create a full haircut, but practice one simple sectioning pattern and repeat it until it’s familiar. A simple center part with two front sections and two back sections and a defined line around the crown is enough to practice in one session. Speed isn’t the objective, the objective is to evaluate whether each line is straight and whether each side is even and whether each section lies flat without the weight of adjacent hair pulling loose ends into the next section. Once one sectioning pattern is complete, release the clips and start over.
Students often fill their combs with too much hair at once which causes blurry partings and inconsistent tension and sections that appear clean until you touch them. To overcome this, take your time and use the point of the comb with lighter pressure. Follow one path with the comb instead of scratching back and forth. If you create a line that is curved or broken, don’t just leave it and move on. Instead, correct it. That’s where the visual learning begins. Another mistake students make is clipping the hair too loosely which allows adjacent hair to lie across the section and disguise flaws. Clips that are placed more snugly help define the head.
A short amount of time can be dedicated to sectioning practice. Within 15 minutes, spend the first few minutes creating one full sectioning pattern as perfectly as possible. The next few minutes should be spent evaluating your symmetry in the mirror and then releasing just one side and re-creating it while evaluating it against the other side. Finally, re-create the entire head again, this time a little more quickly, but never sacrifice the integrity of your lines. This short exercise is more beneficial than one longer exercise because your hands begin to develop a memory of the path. Over the next few days, the same sectioning pattern becomes less intimidating and the visual information becomes less overwhelming.
If the students are having difficulty progressing with sectioning, it may not be their hands that need adjusting, but their eyes. It’s easy to assume a section is straight because the part was made with confidence. Just because you felt confident, doesn’t mean the line isn’t crooked. Take a photo from the front, side and back of the head after sectioning and evaluate where the shape has deviated. Pay close attention to whether the partings intersect at the same point on both sides of the head and whether the clips are placed evenly. This self-assessment exercise can help students turn their frustration from, “It looks funny” to, “The back parting is lower on the left” or “The left side is heavier than the right.”
The exercise of sectioning may seem like a minor part of the haircutting process, but it’s a discipline that will be reflected in every subsequent result. Clean sectioning promotes clean cutting, clean blow-drying, and clean styling patterns. Once the head is defined, every subsequent action has a place to occur. For this reason, the simple exercise of practicing sectioning patterns is a crucial part of the initial learning process. A clean line is not a minor detail in hairdressing, it is the beginning of everything else.
