Leen's Ultimate Frugal Haircut

I had originally planned to share my recipe for the calzones that I made last night but I'm putting that off until tomorrow. Instead, my thirteen year old daughter wants me to share her recent frugal haircut experience with everyone. I love that frugality is exciting and challenging to my kids rather than a drudgery, so share I must!

For as long as Leen can remember she's watched me trim my bangs in between haircuts. A few months back we took Hair Cutting For Dummies out of the library. Maybe I'm just a coward but the notion of cutting hair scares me, although I do routinely buzz the boys' hair.

In the book Leen and I saw a technique for cutting hair that was intriguing. It had you brush all the hair either straight up over your head so you look like one of those magic troll dolls from the 70's & 80's, or brush it all forward so you were holding it straight in front of your forehead. Either way you chose to brush it, you wound up cutting a straight line across the bottom which in turn layers your hair. I remember seeing an article describing this technique is Seventeen in the mid 80's.

Leen gave it a try a few months ago in a very limited, "let me leave enough so a hair dresser can fix if I screw this up" way. It must have been to her liking because she did it this weekend and took off much more length. This afternoon when she came home from school, I couldn't believe how lovely her hair was falling around her face and shoulders. She did a really good job, got a lot of compliments in school and she's thrilled. She's always hated getting her hair cut. Her only complaint was we really need to sharpen the scissors.

As for me, I did the same thing to my hair a few weeks ago and was pleased with the results as well. Just bee warned, this is a mighty simplistic explanation of how to do this. You might want to take the book out of your library for a more thorough explanation. Without the pictures in the book to guide us, I'm not sure if we would have done it.