Textured crop: short on the sides, messy on top

Two elements define it: a forward-worn top with the weight broken up, and a fringe with a visible front line. The top is usually point-cut or scissor-chopped so the ends separate into pieces rather than sitting flat, and the fringe is cut blunt enough to read as a deliberate edge across the forehead.

The sides are where most of the variation lives. A skin fade takes them to nothing at the bottom and gives maximum contrast; a taper keeps a few millimetres and looks more conservative. The height at which the fade starts — low, mid or high — changes the cut more than the length on top does.

It is more forgiving than it looks. Because the top is meant to be messy, growing a week past due is barely visible, and a bad night's sleep is indistinguishable from the intended finish.

The fringe is the reason this cut travels so well across face shapes. Bringing hair forward onto the forehead shortens the visible face, which is exactly what a long or oblong face benefits from. On a square face the broken texture softens the top while the faded sides keep the jaw as the widest point.

It handles thick and coarse hair better than most short cuts, because the texturising is doing the job that bulk would otherwise create. Curly and coily hair works too, in a version where the curl provides the texture and the fringe is shaped rather than cut blunt.

The one group it serves less well is men with a very high or receding hairline — not because the cut looks bad, but because the blunt fringe draws a line across the forehead and invites a comparison with where the hairline sits. A softer, less blunt front edge solves most of this.

We built all 65 cuts in this library — 40on the women's reference model and 25on the men's — from 2 base photographs, one per model, rather than collecting 65 unrelated pictures. Every preview is an edit of that single base photo, so the face, skin texture, pose, clothing, background and lighting are identical across the whole library. The only variable is the hair.

Our method is deliberately constrained: the edit instruction forbids smoothing skin, slimming the face or changing the eyes, because a flattered “after” would make the comparison worthless. That is why the textured crop above can be read against any other cut here — same person, same light. The before-and-after pairs come from one photograph for the same reason, and when you upload your own picture we use that same pipeline, not a different one.

For the fit advice we measure the same way our face shape detector does: 478 facial landmarksread in your browser with Google's MediaPipe Face Landmarker, then compared against 7 reference shapes on fixed ratios — a length-to-width ratio of 1.6 or more reads as oblong, under 1.3 reads round or square, and a jaw at 92% of cheekbone width or wider reads as square. Nothing is uploaded for that step; it runs on your device.

What this cannot tell you:how your own hair will behave once it is cut. Density, growth pattern, cowlicks and the stylist's hand all change the result, and no preview predicts them. Plenty of faces also sit within a percentage point or two of those thresholds, so a small change in head angle can move the reading — treat the fit advice as a shortlist, not a verdict, then take the shortlist to a salon.

Updated November 2026. We revise a cut's page when the advice or the renders change, not on a schedule.