Giving My Daughter a Butterfly Cut- DIY Tutorial

My beautiful 12 year old daughter, Anneliese, has long luxurious locks of wavy hair. I wish my hair was as thick and gorgeous as hers. But she’s needed a haircut desperately for a while. However, she had in mind a very specific type of haircut called a butterfly cut, and she didn’t trust me to do it. There’s a hairdresser in our community that is relatively affordable, and my daughter had her heart set on this person cutting her hair. 

She specifically wanted it cut during summer vacation so she could come back to school with a whole new look.

I begged her to please at least let me cut off her split ends, and she can do the butterfly cut later, but she didn’t want to.

As you can see, her hair was really, really long. The split ends were making her hair knot much more easily, and made it hard for her to take care of it properly.

When we reached out to the hairdresser in our community to give her a haircut, she wasn’t able to do it yet, but my daughter wanted it already and decided that as long as I watched this tutorial on how to give a butterfly cut, she’d trust me to do it. 

I told her I’d do it longer at first, so that way if I make any mistakes we can fix it, but if she wants it shorter, we can do it again.

So, following the instructions, she first washed her hair and left it wet.

We then parted it from the apex of the head, the highest point of the head, going down to slightly behind the ears.

The front part of the hair is then combed neatly into a ponytail at the very front of the head, like a unicorn’s horn in the middle of the forehead.

The back goes in a very high ponytail, at the apex. (We did it as close to it as we could.)

Then, with the hair forward, you just cut straight across the “unicorn horn” ponytail. I cut a good 7 inches off that one. 

Then the higher ponytail, you pull forward and down, and cut the same amount off that one.

You then take scissors and even out the edges, making sure there’s no random hairs that are too long, and make sure it is more gradual of a cut.

Front view.

Side view.

Back view.

It was then that I had the ridiculous idea of blow drying her hair like the guy in the tutorial did with the mannequin’s hair…

For my thin hair, blow drying is terrific because it adds some nice volume…

But I was forgetting that my daughter already had a lot of volume and didn’t need any more volume added…

So she ended up with big, poofy, fluffy hair (which I like to call floofy)… It looked hilarious and was a funny mistake.

She then went and wet her hair again so it could dry naturally…

Look at that gorgeous haircut on that gorgeous girl.

Here’s the side view.

And now, the back view.

Since my daughter typically wears her hair in a ponytail, we decided to see how that would look.

Absolutely adorable.

To say my daughter was thrilled would be an understatement.

We are really happy with how it turned out.

It’s just a shame we didn’t do it all these months earlier.

Do you give haircuts at home? What type of haircuts do you usually do? Do you know how to do any specific special styles? Does this seem like something you’d feel comfortable doing yourself?