How to section hair with precision and accuracy

Hi friends, Andrew Carruthers here education director for Sam Villa. Many, many years ago when I was an apprentice the guy that apprenticed me used to put me through these skills and drills that at times I thought were very tedious and I. Wasn't very happy with him when he would have me do these skills and drills but I. Have to tell you now 17 years later I.

Look back and I'm so thankful for those times that he forced me to practice these things that are really challenging. One of those challenging things is getting very clean partings within hair. He used to sit me down in the back of the the salon with a doll head and he'd say part off a graduated bob 25 times. And in the back of my mind was cursing him but I tell you now that I have the ability to create these clean partings quickly and easily I'm very thankful for that time.

So here are some of the tips we can share with you how you can practice to get really skilled at creating clean partings. Number one let's do this together so at home what I'd like you to do is take your fingers and just put them up like this. Now go ahead and take your fingertips and put them together  pretty easy right? So the easiest way to part hair is to connect your fingertips. You'll notice on our long cutting come there's a parting tooth at the top.

I'm going to take my pointer finger and place it right there at the tip of the parting tooth, I'm going to take my other finger place that where I want to go and now all I have to do is connect the two points It's much easier than trying to draw a straight line without knowing where I'm going and when you do that when you connect, connect quickly. Another thing you can try at home is take a pencil and draw a straight line when you draw that straight line the first time draw it really slow and you'll notice that will be really jiggly second time taken draw it really quickly and you'll notice how clean and straight that line will be. Another tip, and you'll notice that I did this before I connect my fingers is to always comb the hair in the direction that you want to part. If the hair is straight down and I need to part across it I'm fighting through the grain of the hair if I comb the hair in the direction that I want to part the hair get all the grain going in that direction you can see it slips through quite easily then, so comb the hair in the direction that you want to part.

The final one is sometimes when we're creating really long partings, let's say it's a center part for setting up for a haircut and we need to go from one point to another and it's a lot of hair to work through... If you take both fingers and place them right here at the tip or at the parting tooth, when you have both fingers you can actually rest your palm against the head and use that to support and you see you can create really clean clear lines by supporting both sides of the comb and it helps to give you some structure and that works when you have to create really long partings that might be more challenging to do the finger to finger position. So again, first tip: fingertip to fingertip, second tip: always comb the hair in the direction you want to part and the third tip: is if it's a very long parting, support that parting tooth with both fingers, rest the palm against the head to get some good pressure and structure, and then part. Practice those three things  so much of what we do behind the chair is just muscle memory and the more that you practice the better you're going to be behind the chair.

Any questions, comments please feel free to leave them in the box below we love to hear from you guys thanks for watching I'm Andrew Carruthers education director for Sam Villa.