Better than Flowbee

To understand why Flowbee and the older Robocut works, we have to understand haircut theory 101. If every hair in your head is equal in length, you look OK. Of course you adapt the theory to shorter sides, etc. Most haircut, say, business cut, will involve a lot of this basic cut.

So basically both the Flowbee and Robocut hold your hair straight up via vacuum, and cut into equal lengths. That's why they work to some extend. I believe some reviews that the Flowbee cuts more like a scissor with no pulling effect.

I actually build a cheap Robocut in 15 minutes and tried it out using PVC pipes. The main thing is a 3/4" water pipe with a slit cut in it - for the scissor to come in and cut. The other is the attachment to a powerful vacuum.

It works decently to cut a kid's hair (poor kid). The problem is that cutting is slow because you have to put the scissor in restricted place. And that even after blocking some of the air passage with a plastic plate and tape, some hair in each batch are missed. Also because of the difficult in cutting, the cuts are not clean and the hairs are not exactly equal in length. But at the end it looked decent.

After I realized the first principle in hair cutting, I developed the touch cut technique with the touch cut hair clips. Each clip is made of two plastic cards, hinged together by tape. You pull a small strand of (wet) hair straight between the clips, and cut the excess length of hair outside the clip. This is exactly what hair stylists do, but without the precision measurement.

For a man's business cut, you use shorter clips at the sides and gradually shorter at the neck. The Flowbee is fast but the different length blends better by hand.

The "invention" is really suitable for cutting your own hair - hence named touch cut. You do not need to see what you are doing! Because you cannot go wrong. You cannot cut any hair shorter than your clip dictates. If you repeat on the same area long enough, all hair will be of equal length. In practice it's pretty fast, almost as fast as your hair stylists. My experience is that you can cut any hair around your head easily with an ordinary hair scissor, by twisting your head if necessary. If you cut your kid's hair, it's real easy.

A big challenge is a man's business cut for straight hair. The challenge is around the ears and at the neck line. You may need very short length hair. In that case you can use your fingers as clip, meaning hair length the thickness of one finger. You can have two finger width if you stack your left hand fingers and right hand fingers to clip the hair. The Flowbee cannot blend in different hair lengths so easily.

For a business cut you do need to need to trim off the hairs that are out of place to get the neat look. I am not aware of anybody who do this. I attach an old camcorder to a TV, so I can watch the back of my head comfortably, and I can zoom in to watch each hair. It can be done but not too simple because you have to move the cam around your neck to be sure that no hair is out of place.

For precision trimming it's really difficult using scissors looking at the TV like a mirror. I suggest an electric hair trimmer.

The good old clipper is a totally different kind of fish that stylists don't use. Firstly, it cannot cut equal lengths using the hair guards, because you are not pulling the hair straight, and only cutting those.