Hair Clippers

 

The Best Hair Clippers for Home Use

After a dozen real-world tests of eight highly rated hair clippers on volunteers and consulting haircutting experts, we’ve found the Wahl Elite Pro High Performance Haircut Kit is the best home hair clipper for most people. Its sharp steel blades sliced easily through fine, thick, smooth, and coarse hair without slowing down or clogging, and it wasn’t annoyingly loud. The 10 included guide combs—the snap-on plastic teeth that control how closely the clipper cuts, letting you trim hair to the length you want or get creative with styling—were the best among the clippers we tried.

Were we to take up regular home haircutting, this is the clipper we’d reach for first. The Wahl Elite Pro’s combs are a rigid-but-smooth ABS plastic that doesn’t bend when pushed against a scalp, and they stay seated and straight on the blade better than any other set we tried, thanks to a metal retaining clip on the back. They add great value, considering that replacement combs of equal quality for a competitor cost about half the price of this entire clipper kit. The taper lever on the side of the clipper didn’t slip from vibration, which we’ve experienced from other clippers we’ve used in the past. We also liked the Wahl Elite Pro’s thick and extra-long 8-foot power cord. The hard plastic carry case, along with a relatively nice pair of shears with a cover, round out the experience.The small, easy-to-handle Remington Virtually Indestructible Haircut and Beard Trimmer is a close runner-up that’s especially suited to people who want to cut their own hair. This model is lightweight, has rubberized grips along the sides, and is truly palm-sized, making it far easier than any other model we tested to maneuver and hold in a loose grip, even with fingertips, as is often required when clipping one’s own hair. It comes with quality, rigid-plastic guide combs that seat securely, though the tips are fewer and slightly more dangerous than our main pick's. This model also has a thick-but-pliable 8-foot power cord, and a powerful-but-exceptionally-quiet motor—one of our test haircut subjects questioned its effectiveness solely for that reason (“It’s too quiet to really be cutting hair, right?”) The carrying bag also isn’t as useful as that of our main pick. At about a third of the price, though, those downsides may be forgivable for many people.