Cut it dry
Wet hair lies about its length, and curly hair lies about it more convincingly than anything else on a head.
Water is the most persuasive liar in a barbershop. It pulls every strand on a head to roughly the same tension, drops it into a straight vertical line, and presents you with a tidy, even, entirely fictional version of the hair you are about to cut. On straight hair the fiction is small — a centimetre of spring at most. On a tight curl pattern it can be sixty percent of the visible length, distributed unevenly across the head, and no amount of experience lets you guess where it will land.
So we do not guess. Curly hair at this studio is cut dry, unwashed, styled the way you actually wear it, curl by curl. It takes longer, it looks less impressive as a process, and it is the only honest method I know.
Shrinkage is not a rounding error
A 3B curl loses perhaps a third of its length when it dries. A 4A coil can lose three quarters. That is not a margin you can correct for with a rule of thumb, because the ratio changes across a single head — the crown is usually looser than the nape, the perimeter is usually looser than the interior, and any section that has been heat-damaged behaves like a different hair type entirely.
Cut that head wet to an even line and it will dry into a shape nobody asked for: heavy at the sides, hollow at the back, with a perimeter that rises and falls like a coastline. The cut was technically even. The head is not.
Nobody has ever walked around wet. So why would anyone design a haircut in that state and hope for the best.
What curl-by-curl actually means
It is less mystical than it sounds. Each curl family — a cluster that forms and falls together — is isolated, lifted to its natural resting tension rather than stretched, and cut at a single point. Then it is released and allowed to settle before anything next to it is touched. You are not removing length from a section. You are deciding where one individual spiral ends and letting it inform the one beside it.
- No comb through a formed curl. A comb separates a curl clump into its component strands and destroys the very thing you are trying to read.
- No tension. Pulling a curl straight to cut it is just wet cutting without the water.
- Point cutting into the curl’s own curve, never straight across, so the end tapers rather than blunting.
- Regular stand-backs. The shape only exists at two metres; at arm’s length you are looking at texture, not silhouette.
- Nothing is finished until the whole head has been released and looked at from four sides.
Come in with your hair as it is
This is the part clients find counter-intuitive. The best possible condition for a dry curl appointment is second or third day hair, styled the way you wear it, with whatever product you normally use still in. Freshly washed and diffused-to-perfection hair is no more useful to me than wet hair, because it is not the hair you will be living with.
- Do not straighten it in the week before. I need to see the pattern, not a memory of it.
- Do not turn up with it tied back. The compression flattens the crown for hours.
- Do bring the products you use, or at least photograph the labels. Half of a curl consultation is about what you are putting on your head.
- Expect ninety minutes. A dry curl cut done properly cannot be rushed into an hour, and anyone offering to is cutting a different haircut.
The conversation nobody has with you
The technical part is only half of it. The other half is porosity, and it is the single most under-discussed thing in curly hair care. High-porosity hair — usually hair that has been coloured, heat-styled or simply lives in hard water — drinks product in and loses moisture just as fast. Low-porosity hair repels water at the cuticle, which means most of what you have been layering on has been sitting on the surface, weighing down the pattern and never absorbing at all.
You can test it in a glass of water in thirty seconds, and the answer changes your entire routine: whether you use cream or gel, whether you apply to soaking or damp hair, whether heat helps or ruins it. It has nothing to do with cutting and everything to do with whether the cut looks like anything by Thursday.
Dry cutting is slower and costs more, and I understand why the industry mostly does not do it. But hair that changes length when it dries needs to be cut in the state it will be seen in. Everything else is a forecast.
Mika Oyelaran — 26 August 2025
