Beauty Blast From The Past: Haircuts for Kids

Growing up, haircuts were always an issue. Though some of us were lucky enough to be treated to monthly visits at the mall salon, for most of us, the kitchen doubled as a spa, and our mom played the often unconvincing role of stylist extraordinaire. Who could forget the first time she cut our hair too short and we refused to go to school without a hat on for a month? When we got older we put our Barbie snipping skills to the test on ourselves, and had to hide the missing chunk of hair with a barrette all summer long until it grew back. Those were the days.

It’s no wonder we had haircuts on the brain at such a young age. The world was pushing us to prune our hair everywhere we looked—the T.V., the computer, and even the classroom. Take a look at some of the most hilarious hair cutting products from our childhood to yours, and be thankful we’ve made it this far without shaving it all off!

SAFETY SCISSORS

We all remember our first pair of safety scissors—the rounded tips helped us avoid poking out an eye as we ran wildly through class with them. The impressively dull “blades” were designed to keep us from doing the inevitable—chopping away at our virgin hair. In reality, our safety-first scissors kept us from cutting, well, anything! Just think of all the hacked-up cuts and paper snowflakes that never were, thanks to our useless classroom-approved instruments.

BABY DOLLY SURPRISE

“Her ponytail grows right before your eyes!” the commercial proclaimed. How could we forget—it played at nearly every commercial break during Muppet Babies! Any one could fake a haircut on Baby Dolly Surprise by simply cranking her arm roughly back and forth to extend or retract her pretty ponytail, which gave us all false ideas about our future hairstyles. If only swinging our arms back and forth could make our own hair grow. At any rate, Baby Dolly Surprise was a breath of fresh air after we ruined all our Barbie dolls with mommy’s thinning shears.

THE FLOWBEE

A vacuum cleaner that cuts hair has got to be one of the most stupidly practical ideas ever invented, but the idea of zero clean up intrigued us (and most of America). Unfortunately, our suctioned blunt cut just plain sucked. The black and yellow nozzle of the Flowbee had the appeal of our dad’s tool chest and using it left us feeling like a stand in on Home Improvement. Jonathan Taylor Thomas would never respond to our fan mail now, though in all fairness, his blown-back bowl cut was nothing to write home about...

ONLINE HAIR MAKEOVERS

The way of the future was the new wave of hair salon software that hit the general public like a techie typhoon in the late ‘90s. Now we could pick our hairstyles the same way that Cher picked out her daily ensembles in Clueless. Using our up-to-the-minute plug in webcams, we snapped expressionless pics of ourselves and proceeded to try on a dozen digitized hairstyles in hexadecimal hues of garish blonde and brown. Too bad we blew all our hair cut money on this silly software.