I’m now at the point where photos of DIY haircuts are starting to trickle into my social media feeds.

CBC Radio host Matt Galloway took to the clippers last week; dozens of articles have popped up on how to cut your own hair (many focusing on just bangs) and if you look up #DIYHaircut on Twitter there’s an endless stream of people giving themselves trims or close buzzes.

My friends have also done it — with varying degrees of success. One used dog clippers and I love him enough not to publish the picture here.

I haven’t cut my hair since January and I realized the other night it’s now long enough to tie back into a mini man bun. My partner suggested that I get my mom, whom I’m isolating with, to cut it, but the memories of the bowl cuts (and rat tail) she gave me as a kid flooded back into my head. I decided to call my barber to see what I should do to look at least semi-presentable whenever I have to appear on video for work.

“People have been messaging their barbers asking what products they should buy and whether they should cut their own hair. A few dudes have told me they always wanted to shave their heads and I say now is the best time to do it,” says Pace Batucan, who has been a barber for 10 years and has been cutting hair at the West Queen West location of Town Barber for the last two.

Over Skype, he took off his toque to reveal his shaven head. I’m not ready to go that far, so he offered suggestions for people whose hair is like mine: not short enough for a simple buzz but not long enough to tie back into a ponytail.

Of course, it’s not just about length. I have coarse Asian hair that benefits from not being washed every day to let the natural oils give it texture. My partner has very fine blond hair that easily gets greasy. New online communities have popped up since the pandemic to help Black women with their hair-care needs at home.

But for people with hair like mine, Batucan suggests styling to get it more manageable before picking up the scissors.

“Towel dry your hair until it’s damp after a shower or a rinse under the tap, and then style it with a comb or brush,” he says. “Let it dry naturally to hold its shape, or blow-dry it if you want to manipulate it into a specific shape. If you want a tighter feeling with some hold, comb it back, get a hat or a beanie, wear it for an hour and it will hold without having to use product. You don’t need product if you aren’t going outside, but if it helps you feel better, then sure.”

Longer hair is actually easier to style, he says, because the weight of the hair makes it easier to keep down. The challenge of cutting your own hair is that the perspective isn’t always accurate while looking into a mirror, and the scissors and beard trimmers most people have at home aren’t designed to cut large swaths of hair.

“It can go bad, especially for guys’ hair, because it’s usually shorter,” he says. “Women typically have longer hair, so if they take an inch off it’s not as noticeable.”

If you must cut, Batucan says to focus on the two areas that most bother people with shorter hair: the ears and the neck. After styling your damp hair, use a beard trimmer or a small pair of scissors to carefully follow the curvature of the ear to get rid of any stray hairs that have been poking into the ear. “If you can do that, it will feel better and look better in profile.”

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As for the neck, if you’re isolating with another person get them to trim the hair at the back of the head. They can also pull up the hair and, using a trimmer, shave off any hair that is below the person’s natural hairline to clean up the neck. “This is always better to have someone else do it because they can see the back of your head better,” he says. “There are a lot of cases of people doing it themselves and going too high up beyond their natural hairline because they didn’t know when to stop.”

The next morning I wet my hair, brushed it back and, using a pair of household scissors, trimmed the sideburns that were flying away from my face and the hairs poking into my ears. It immediately made me feel better.

Embarrassingly, it never occurred to me to take two minutes in the morning to comb my hair. The air dry tip was also a good one: I wished I had known that before I added globs of gel in my hair minutes before a TV appearance a few weeks ago.

It’s not a drastic makeover, but my goal for the next weeks (and probably months) is to just keep the stray hairs out of my eyes and ears so that when I return to Batucan once Town Barber reopens, he’ll be cutting my hair rather than fixing it.