If you’re new to razor cutting or even if you’re an advanced user, learning proper razor cutting techniques can take your razor skills to a new level. By using the best razor tools and products and getting professional education you can live your best life in the salon and give beautiful razor hair cuts to all your clients.

If you’re looking to learn how to cut hair with a razor these cutting hair tips will get you on the path understanding precision hair cutting techniques that are clean and sound. In this video you will learn a razor cutting technique for clean cutting using 2 different razors.

Follow along with this technical deep dive on clean razor cutting techniques and the transcript below.

Razor Cutting Technique Tutorial: 

Welcome back to Jatai Academy! Today we’re going to be doing a technical deep dive on how to get a clean cut with a razor. So let’s get started.

How to Hold a Feather Styling Razor (Guarded Blades)

First thing is how you’re going to hold the razor. You can hold the Feather Styling Razor a lot of different ways. Now the benefit of using the Feather Styling Razor is it has a built-in guard so you don’t have to worry so much about cutting yourself and also it’s a completely rigid unit.

So you don’t have any flex points in the middle to worry about if you don’t have a good dexterity and control of your hand. A single unit like this will be a lot easier to control.

Now a lot of people will tend to hold it with their pinky or ring finger into the ring and the blade facing them when they’re holding it. I tend to hold it the opposite way where I have the blade facing away from me and then I bend my fingers so that my knuckles make a right angle.

Now the blade is facing down. This allows me to keep my wrist straight and my elbow out from my body so I have a lot more dexterity. I find when I hold it this way I tend to drop my elbow and drop my wrist and it’s harder for me to control when I’m dealing with small tight areas like in the nape.

So I hold it facing away from me. If you hold it facing towards you that’s fine. The main thing is just make sure you have a solid grip on it. If you don’t want to put your finger in the ring, you can put one pinky on one side, thumb on the other, three fingers and do the claw method where I still bend my fingers over.

And now I have my pinky and my thumb on the inside and my three fingers on the outside. The next thing is I want to make sure that my blade is very very sharp so with each haircut I’m going to use a new blade.

How to Remove and Replace Blades

Sometimes if they have finer hair I can use one blade on two haircuts. Sometimes if the hair is very thick and coarse I might need to use two blades on the same haircut. So I’m going to remove this, get the blade out.

I have the cartridge right here. I’ll slide it right in. Easy to replace, brand new fresh sharp blade. The sharper the blade is, the less pressure I have to use to apply the razor to the hair to cut a clean line. If I want to cut a real clean one length type of shape, I’ll comb everything clean from the root all the way through to my fingers.

How to Angle the Razor in the Hair

I get a nice tight grip on my fingers, lay that as close to the head as I can. I’ll lay the blade flat and I will tilt the blade at a 45° angle. Actually, it’s a little less than 45. I just want a nice pitch of the blade to where the blade is hitting the hair at an angle.

It doesn’t have to be 45. 45 is probably too much so maybe we’re going to do 28, 28 to 30 somewhere around there. I just want a nice pitch of the angle.

Brush down and you’ll start to feel when you have the right angle for cutting with razor. It will be effortless to move that blade up and down and go through and cut that section all the way through. You notice I did not move my left hand. It stayed stationary. I only moved the razoring hand. Get that out of the way. If I pushed any hair out I’ll go through clean that up.

So that’s the first method for how to cut hair using a razor and cutting a nice clean line is just to lay the blade against the head, tilt it at a slight angle and a very very small razor stroke. The smaller the razor stroke the more blunt that your section is going to be.

The Unguarded Feather Plier Razor

Now if I wanted to move up and move to the Feather Plier which is a guardless razor. It has no guard on it. It’s just a straight blade. I want to keep the same things in mind. First thing I want to replace the blade so that I know that it’s sharp.

This comes in a little cartridge like this. On the bottom you can store the blade. Be careful when you pull that out, goes in the bottom, closes up, no problem. The top pushes out. I have a new blade revealed.

Line that into the ridges into the blade holder. And now I have a nice sharp fresh blade. The best way to hold this is to actually pivot to where it’s at a 90° angle. I’ll place that really really deep in my forefinger and my middle finger and then I’ll push out towards my finger tip.

Cutting with an Unguarded Blade

Curling these three fingers in, my thumb rests here to keep that tight and my forefinger goes towards the tip of the blade. This way I can control how much of the blade moves with just my forefinger. Now we’re going to go through and cut this blunt again.

Comb everything nice and clean and smooth. There’s my line underneath, put the blade in, get a nice pitch. Real gently just move that across. Now I’m moving my whole arm because I don’t want to arc the movement of the blade. I want the blade moving parallel to the hair.

Now I’m being very very careful and very mindful of the blade touching my skin. One thing that will help with that is I don’t chase the hair. I comb everything into my finger. One thing you want to do when cutting hair with razor is to create a death grip with my finger so that the hair does not move.

The next step is to gently apply pressure. If I have to apply a lot of pressure, my blade’s dull and I need to change it and I need to make sure that the hair is an optimal wetness. If the hair is too dry it’s going to scrape and it’s going to shatter the cuticle.

If it’s too wet I’m not going to be able to see how clean my underneath guide is. Does that make sense? I’m not going to be able to see my guide from underneath because it’s all going to stick together. I think that’s probably a better explanation.

When I go to section I close my blade so I don’t want any sort of mishap from me going through and sectioning each section. I close the blade every time.

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Razoring Technique for Movement

Now if I want to razor cut hair introduce movement, then I will use a different technique. I’ll take my section, I’ll hold it down. There’s my guide from underneath. Now from here I will put the blade at the inside of my finger or at the tip of my finger depending upon which side that I’m going to cut and then I only move straight up and down as I cut from the inside of my finger to the outside of my finger.

Now there’s a little trick here for how to razor cut hair that I want to bring to your attention and that is if I only use the tip of my blade every time I go through and cut, it’s going to dull the tip of the blade very very quickly. So what I want to do is I want to be conscientious of that and use the entire length of the blade.

So what I’ll do is when I come in here to cut this section, I’ll cut at the back of the blade right here at the very root of it and as I move the blade up and down I’m also moving to the tip. So I start at the back and as I move I go towards the tip of the blade.

The best thing to do for cutting hair with a razor is to start at the back of the cutting razor and move towards the tip. That way I can keep a nice clean straight line by cutting interior going towards the front which is going to create movement but also it’s going to keep my blade evenly sharp and it’s going to dull at the same time.

I’m not going to over dull the tip and the rest of the blade is super sharp. And so by being mindful of my blade usage I won’t go through blade so quickly. Now the benefit of using the Plier over using the Feather Styling Razor to cut hair is that the Plier I have much more fine control and dexterity and I can end up with a cleaner cut line.

This [Feather Styling Razor] is much safer and will give me a nice clean line but because it has the softening effect of the guard I can’t get as clean of a line. So ultimately this [Feather Plier Razor] will give me a cleaner line.

Alright so we’re going to comb everything down. I’ll come in. Now here I don’t go from the tip into the very root of the blade. I keep the tip to the middle of the blade when I’m working from the interior to the front on the right side of the head.

Come in, there’s my angle and I slowly move about halfway through. I don’t try to go all the way to the root of the blade because then it gets a little bit close to my finger and I don’t have as much control.

So the way that I compensate for that is when I cut the left side instead of starting at the tip I will start at the base of the blade the root of the blade and go towards the middle.

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Now say that I come through and I cut something and it’s a little longer, I can go through and clean that up by rolling my fingers over to create tension on the hair and being very gentle as I run the blade across the hair on top of my finger.

I have to be very very mindful to not use a lot of pressure and cut all the way through and then to cut my finger. It’s a very very small stroke but it will allow me to clean up my line as much as I need to so those are the two fundamental ways of doing a razor cut where you get a clean line.

It’s not always about just filleting the hair until it becomes string. Sometimes you want a nice solid shape but you want the softness of a razor. The razor give you a softness you can’t get any other way. This is where the nuances of how to razor hair come into play. So let’s finish this up and see how she looks when we’re all done.

The End Results

I think we’re looking pretty good this is our end result. Our whole goal was to try to get as clean a cut as possible using the razor. So I showed you how to do it on two different razors, the guard and the guardless. And I think it looks pretty good.

We got a nice clean lin

e. We got a nice little bit of texture in the bottom of it. It’s got a nice amount of movement to it and swing. I think I got her a little longer on the left side but I’m just going to have her walk around like that from now on so we’re not going to pay attention to that.

But same thing on the bangs. I just held straight down and just cut straight across. These different cutting techniques for hair will hopefully help with your razor techniques in the future.

Please check out the Jatai Academy. There’s all kinds of great information on there that will make you a better hairdresser and a better barber. And let us know what you’d like to see in the future and until then thank you so much for watching and we will see you next time.

You can find the Feather Plier Razor and Feather Styling Razor in our shop as well as all of the accompanying blades.

This video is all about razor cutting. If you would like to learn more about scissor cutting such as point cutting and texturizing with scissors, go to Education Connect and in the filter for ‘Select Tool,’ choose ‘Shears and Scissors.’

If you want to learn how to remove bulk from hair and how to cut with a razor building fundamental razor skills, check out the Razor Fundamentals Course.

For general videos on how to do different razored hairstyles such as razor cut shags, how to razor cut short hair or razor haircuts for fine hair, go to Education Connect and in the filter for ‘Select Tool,’ choose ‘Haircutting Razors.’