The 4 Best Hair Clippers for Home Use in 2024 Reviews by Wirecutter
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Barber Eric Aleman cautioned in particular that should you ever drop a clipper, be sure to immediately inspect the blade for any bent or (especially) broken teeth. If the blade isn’t replaceable, recycle or toss the clipper, and be sure to cut the power cord to ensure that someone else who might find it doesn’t use it unknowingly. In our testing, the Wahl Color Pro Plus Haircutting Kit was a close contender to the Elite Pro. The biggest difference between them is that the Elite Pro’s guide combs are more durable.
How To Pick The Best Hair Clippers
He has been covering technology as a writer and editor since the days before mobile phones got smart. His work has been featured in various print and online publications, and on television. For the past decade, they have written about and tested beauty products for Teen Vogue, Allure, and other outlets. They’re currently working on a nonfiction book about the beauty industry, The House of Beauty, to be published by Norton.
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An Easy, Color-By-Numbers Choice
This model also has a thick but pliable 8-foot cord and a powerful—but exceptionally quiet—motor, making it a solid choice for cutting kids’ hair. Since there are plenty of terrific hair clippers out there, I homed in on some of the best options from top brands and started with cordless picks as a baseline, since that’s a major factor for home users. For roughly the cost of a professional haircut, you can buy a long-lasting tool to create and maintain your own short, buzzed, or shaved hairstyles at home. Its sharp steel blades easily slice through fine, thick, smooth, and coarse hair without slowing down or clogging. To regularly give haircuts at home, we’d reach first for the Wahl Elite Pro High Performance Hair Clipper Kit.
A Top-Tier Pro Tool
The ones she liked best, she used more readily on her own customers with a variety of hair types and style preferences. Together, we looked at the following things most closely when casting the winners list. Her main strike against it though is the omission of any trimming options between 0 and 1/16 inch. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing for most home users, it does mean you can’t really fade anything from a bare shave; instead you would want to start with 1/16 inch.
For expert insight, I tapped Evelyn Gutweniger, who is a Berlin-based barber at Nomad Barber. She has been cutting hair for 16 years, having trained in Italy, then barbering in the U.K., Australia and Germany. I’ve said many good things about the Philips Norelco Series 9000 tools in the past—also our best overall pick for the best beard trimmer—but there are more kind words to say yet.
A barbershop classic, the Fast Feed is a pro-grade tool that’s good for those who sport a close buzz or fade and need frequent touch-up trims. I’ve been a men’s grooming journalist for over a decade, covering the beat for titles like Forbes, GQ, Men’s Journal, Robb Report, Spy, Gear Patrol and more. I’ve grown my hair out past my shoulders a few times, and I’ve buzzed it all the way back down a hundred times. I’ve even had a hair transplant (in the name of research!) to have more of a canvas to work with up top.
To find the best hair clippers, I researched the market and summoned eight well-reviewed, industry-favorite devices to my doorstep. I then called on the expertise of my trusted barber, Evelyn Gutweniger of Nomad Barber in Berlin. In addition to testing these devices with home users in mind, Gutweniger also advised me on what to consider when buying hair clippers. Read on for all of that, and check out my reviews of the Andis ReVite and Wahl Color Pro Cordless devices as well. The Wahl Professional 5-Star Series Magic Clip Cordless is a pro-level machine, but the 90-minute battery life isn’t ideal.
At the end, we asked participants to pick the model they favored and would be most comfortable using themselves. This is one beautiful machine, with its magnetic guards and its digital display and 0.1 mm incremental trimmer adjustments. You’ll get dual beard trimming and hair clipping use from it, too, and you can take things all the way down to a zero gap if you need skin-tight cutting (be warned, that’s a task best done by the pros). The Wahl Elite Pro’s build quality is a noticeable step above that of most mid-tier models available in big-box stores.
As is true of blades, when it comes to motors, most home users wouldn’t notice much difference between types—other than their loudness. Magnetic motors, which all our picks have, are the most common and make a signature whap noise when turned on. One of our experts suggested that advances in magnetic motors are making pivot motors effectively obsolete. Compared with many of today’s household devices, hair clippers are decidedly low-tech. Arabelle Sicardi is a beauty writer and editor currently working on a nonfiction book, The House of Beauty, about the beauty industry.
Similarly, the Wahl Deluxe Chrome Pro is a 25-piece kit that, like the Andis Headliner Combo, has flimsy guide combs that didn’t seat reliably for us. The included battery-operated trimmer is useful and is in fact a missing element from our top pick. The Wahl device's color-coded guards make it visually easier to change up clipping lengths. We previously recommended the Remington HKVAC2000A as an option for easier cleanup. But our 2021 testers consistently found it to be the most flimsy model overall, the hardest to hold, and very loud.
Compared with the Elite Pro’s guide combs, however, the Color Pro Plus’s combs are a touch flimsier and do not have the metal reinforcements. With its terrific build quality, powerful motor, sturdy not overly stiff guide combs, and long cord, this model will satisfy the needs of most people who cut hair at home. The clipper’s eight included guide combs are made of rigid ABS plastic, so they don’t deform and leave track marks or trap and pull out hair when pressed against your head. They attach and seat firmly, unlike on some other models we tested, whose attachments had enough play that they could go on crooked or pop off altogether. The Oster Fast Feed Adjustable Pivot Motor Clipper is a staple of barbershops because of its power, ruggedness, and reliability—it can work all day without fatiguing the stylist or causing its motor to overheat.
On top of that, this tool has a runtime that outpaces its charge time (130-minute endurance against a 90-minute charge). For the cost of an average haircut ($25 to $60 or so), three of our picks will easily handle the job for you. Clippers tend to last an extremely long time, so for not much outlay, you can have a useful device on hand for many, many years to come (one expert said he knows of barbers who have decades-old clippers in daily use at their shops). Since the pandemic hit in 2020, more and more people have been doing at-home hair maintenance—for themselves and others.
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But compared with other pro-level models we tested, the Oster is considerably easier to use and generally less expensive. Almost all clipper kits come with at least one questionable accessory—like cheap scissors or a garbage-bag-quality cape—that seems great until you have to tuck it in a drawer or root through a pile of them to find what you want. Our pick comes with a useful assortment of 10 combs that are clearly labeled and easier to sort than those of most competing models; most have combs with impossible-to-read, raised black-plastic numbers on black plastic. For our 2021 update to this guide, we also consulted freelance hairstylist Topher Gross and, separately, Simon He of Techni Salon NY. At the beginning of the pandemic, Gross—who has been cutting hair for decades—taught people how to cut their own hair, on Zoom and other online platforms (and occasionally outdoors).
Gutweniger, who often cuts with other Wahl devices, also raved about this one and trusted it enough to use regularly on her customers at the barbershop. She loves its sturdy guards, which don’t bend or bow as you move them around the head. And she isn’t bothered by its 12-hour charge time—which, to my frustration, extended to 15 or 16 hours before I realized that the charging light doesn’t ever turn off or change its color once complete. Instead, the 75-minute runtime is enough to keep heads buzzed for months on end, with a simple overnight re-up.
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