The 10 Best Hair Clippers for DIY Buzz Cuts, Bald Men, and Shape-Ups 2023

Table Of Content

• How to Dye Your Hair at Home (Even Though You Probably Shouldn’t)
• Also great: Remington Virtually Indestructible Haircut and Beard Trimmer
• Best Corded Hair Clipper: Oster Fast Feed hair clipper
• Best Dual Hair Clipper + Beard Trimmer: Bevel Pro hair clipper and beard trimmer
• Beauty & Grooming needs Since 1988

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. If you plan to continue maintenance trims or shaves between professional cuts (or skip salons and barber shops entirely), it’s worth investing in a tool that you like to use and is easy to maintain. For expert insight, I tapped Evelyn Gutweniger, who is a Berlin-based barber at Nomad Barber.

How to Dye Your Hair at Home (Even Though You Probably Shouldn’t)

At least once a year we revisit this list, adding the latest and greatest, while making sure time-tested favorites get pricing and availability updates. In our testing, we consider the different needs of DIY haircutters as we vet products, and that's reflected in the way we assign the winners their titles. Particularly because some of you may want more than one clipper besides one for everyday use—maybe a more portable one for the road, or a clipper that excels at edgework. The below list takes into account those possibilities, as well as our experience actually using the clippers.

Also great: Remington Virtually Indestructible Haircut and Beard Trimmer

But among pros with the technical capability, a taper lever is an essential element for blending and fading between different lengths of hair, especially on the side of the head. For a home-haircutting enthusiast, though, its value is extremely subjective. 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). Separately, He and the staff at Techni Salon NY tried all the clippers we considered in 2020 and 2021 to compare them with their favorite tools and provide technical feedback to help us narrow down options for our at-home testers.

Best Corded Hair Clipper: Oster Fast Feed hair clipper

We also have picks both for novices and for those more experienced in cutting hair at home. And we recommend a smaller, quieter model that’s ideal for cutting your own or kids’ hair. The Wahl Color Pro needs a full overnight charge to refill the tank, but one big upside is that the clippers can be used while plugged in. That’s not true of all hair clippers—and it ensures there’s never a moment where you can’t get a trim. We carry a huge selection of barber supplies and hair clippers including Wahl, Babyliss, Oster, and Gamma/Stylecraft at unbeatable prices for barbers and general public.

What to Look For in Hair Clippers

That’s almost negligible considering its many other benefits, but still worth noting. For over 36 years, we've supported the next generation of hair professionals by helping ambitious students prepare for the State Board Exam. Today, we continue to support students and professionals by providing them with a great variety of tools and supplies to perform business. We haven’t tested the beloved Andis T-Outliner, a specialty/companion tool that’s best for outlining (such as around the ears), shaving, and precision fades.

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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. Here are two other devices that were well-reviewed around the web but that didn’t make the cut on this roster of winners. That’s not saying they’re bad devices, but they aren’t among the best of the best for mass use or at-home buzz cuts.

One of our experts suggested that advances in magnetic motors are making pivot motors effectively obsolete. 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. The vacuum feature—this model sucks up loose hair so it doesn’t land on you or the floor—is the best and only thing this model has going for it.

If you mow through your head hair with a beard trimmer, you'll spend more time to get an uneven buzz, and probably painfully yank on your hair in the process. Two of our favorite choices above, the Bevel Pro and the Wahl Peanut, are built to handle both beard trimming and hair clipping. We haven’t tested the corded Wahl 5-Star Senior, which is often compared to the Andis Master and is therefore best for experienced haircutters. It is specifically made for taper work and precision fades—which leads to excellent pro-level detail work.

As a result, it’s far easier than any other model we tested to maneuver and hold in a loose grip, even with fingertips (as is often required when you’re clipping your own hair). This clipper comes with eight rigid-plastic, quality guide combs that seat securely (though they have fewer tips, slightly sharper in feel, than our main pick’s combs do). 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. 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.

But beyond those minor gripes, Bevel’s pro-grade device is a rarity in this space; it’s one of the few non-tentpole names to enter this field and perform among the best of them. (And it is inarguably the most beautiful device of the bunch.) Since Bevel’s acquisition by Procter & Gamble in 2018, though, it’s becoming harder to consider Bevel an outsider anymore. Rather, this quality is baseline for them, and this multitasking tool is one of the best upgrades you can make in the grooming realm. Many clippers with magnetic motors (as opposed to pivot or rotary motors) have a large adjustment screw located on the side.

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. The GQ staff, blessed with all sorts of domes, is constantly trying new grooming products as they hit the market, hair clippers included.

But frankly that’s not enough of a priority, especially considering that you get better precision with smaller clippers we tried. During our at-home testing, we were able to try out clippers on a wide range of hair types, from extra-fine to thick, from straight to kinky, and from thin (or thinning) to dense. The authors tested a range of clippers on themselves and members of their households. In 2016, we recruited an expert barber, Eric Aleman of the King of Kings Barber Shop in Brooklyn, to test several contenders on a client and to offer his opinions and insight. In 2021, before narrowing down the options, we recruited Simon He at Techni Salon NY to similarly test contenders.