How to Find the Right Haircut for Your Face Shape After 60

📖 Forty years of dressing women over 60, the whole method, set down in one book https://viviansinclairstyle.com/ Renata and I argued about this for the better part of 20 years, in her salon, usually while I was sitting in the chair with a towel round my neck and in no position to leave. My position was that a haircut is about the face. Hers was that a haircut is about the hair, and that I should stick to frocks. We were both wrong, and we worked out why on a wet Tuesday over a cup of tea she had let go cold. A HAIRCUT HAS ONE JOB. It puts width where your face is narrow, and takes width away where your face is wide. That is the whole of it. The layers, the fringe, the length, are simply the means. AND THE PART NOBODY TELLS YOU: your face shape has changed, and in a particular direction. The pad of fat that sits high on the cheek gradually comes down, the jaw softens and widens a little, and the temples hollow very slightly. So a face that was widest at the cheekbone at 40 is often widest nearer the jaw at 65. A great many women are square or round NOW who were oval or heart shaped once — and they are still asking for the cut that suited the face they had at 40. Your hair has not betrayed you. You were handed a new face shape without any notice and you are still using the old paperwork. RENATA'S METHOD for finding your shape, and it takes two minutes: scrape all your hair back, stand square to a mirror in daylight, close one eye, and trace the outline of your face on the glass with a bar of soap or an old lip pencil. Then step back and look at THE SHAPE YOU DREW, not at your face. That instruction is the whole point: you cannot judge your own face while looking at your own face. On the glass it is just a shape, and you can be fair to it. Then, what each shape actually wants: • ROUND — and why a blunt chin-length bob is the hardest cut of all on this face • SQUARE — softening a strong jaw rather than matching it, and why a heavy straight fringe makes a square of the whole head • HEART — adding width low, keeping it off the temple • LONG — the one shape where a fringe genuinely earns its place • DIAMOND — the shape most often cut wrongly, and why • OVAL — choose on your hair, not your face, and go and enjoy yourself Plus the neck advice that applies to every shape, which is the opposite of what most women do. AND A WORD ABOUT THE "GRANNY CUT": there is no such thing. No length is inherently ageing and short hair is not the villain. What those videos are pointing at is a cut chosen without any reference to the face — short all over, volume high on the crown, nothing at the jaw. It reads as ageing for purely geometric reasons. Move the volume low on that very same cut and it stops looking like anything of the sort. Same length. Same woman. Different geometry. And long hair after 60 is not automatically ageing either — that is the same lazy thinking wearing the opposite hat. WHAT TO ACTUALLY SAY IN THE CHAIR: do not take in a photograph of somebody else. Say the thing you want instead of the thing you saw, in three sentences — where you want the width, where you do not want the length to finish, and what you honestly do in the mornings. Say it truthfully rather than aspirationally, because she will cut to the answer you give her. And Renata's own rule: ask her what SHE would do if it were her head. THE HONEST PART: hair grows. I have had exactly one disaster, in 1988, and by Christmas it was an ordinary bob. And I am not a hairdresser and nor is anybody else making these videos — have this conversation with a person who is standing behind you and can see your actual head. 📖 Forty years of dressing women over 60, the whole method, set down in one book https://viviansinclairstyle.com/ Tell me in the comments which shape you turned out to be, and whether it was what you expected. I am fairly sure it will not be, for most of you. I read every single one. Subscribe for a new video every week on style, hair and elegance after 60. #HaircutsOver60 #FaceShape #Over60Style #WomenOver60 #SilverHair #HairOver60 #StyleOver60 #AgingGracefully