What's my hair type? Curl pattern, density and strand thickness, checked at home

When people ask “what's my hair type?” they usually mean curl pattern, which this guide, like Fitcut, also calls texture. Stylists mean more than that. A cosmetology study guide to Milady's chapter on hair design defines hair type by two major characteristics, wave patterns and hair texture, and describes each combination with fine, medium or coarse texture ^[1]. Density, the number of strands on your head, is the third piece, and it varies independently of the other two.

• Curl pattern: the shape each strand takes as it dries, from straight to tightly coiled.
• Density: how many strands you have, which shows up as how much scalp you can see.
• Strand thickness: the width of a single hair. Fine hair can still be dense, and coarse hair can be sparse.

Fitcut uses all three, in different ways. Curl pattern is a hard check: a cut is hidden when your pattern is well outside its texture range, and shown with a caveat when you're one step outside it. Density lowers a cut's fit the further you are from its range. Strand thickness comes from one quiz question and nudges individual cuts up or down.

1. 1

   Start clean

   Wash with your usual shampoo, skip styling products, and let your hair dry without heat or brushing.

2. 2

   Look at more than one section

   Check the front, the crown and the back. Plenty of heads have more than one pattern, so note each one.

3. 3

   Match the shape

   Compare what you see with the table below and pick the closest row. If you land between two, write down both.

Pattern matters most because it decides how many cuts can work at all. The next table counts, for each pattern, how many cuts in Fitcut's catalog are built for it and how many accept it with some adjustment.

Compare 2A, where 38 cuts are built for the pattern, with 3C, where 10 are. The shorter your pattern's list, the more the texture check decides for you, which is why tight curls and coils have their own guides: curly hair for men and coily hair.

Thick and thin usually describe density, the number of strands, not the width of each one. Check it on dry hair under bright light:

1. Part your hair down the middle and look along the part and at the crown.
2. Scalp clearly visible between the strands: low density.
3. Some scalp visible if you look for it: medium density.
4. Hardly any scalp visible, even at the part: high density.

Density changes what a cut can hold. Layered cuts need bulk: the shag, the wolf cut and the butterfly cut all list medium to high density. Blunt outlines and shorter shapes suit low density, because a solid line reads as more hair. The Milady study guide flags one combination in particular: curly, fine hair can separate and show scalp unless it's thick in density ^[1].

A barber academy's consultation guide makes the same point about clippers: dense, thick hair and fine, thin hair behave completely differently at the same guard length, and a #3 guard looks shorter on thick hair than on fine hair ^[3].

A sudden change in your curl pattern or density, or a part that quickly looks wider, isn't a haircut question. See a dermatologist.

Strand thickness is the width of a single hair. For a rough check, take one shed hair and roll it between your fingertips. If you can barely feel it, it's fine; if you can feel it clearly, medium; if it feels thick or wiry, coarse. It's a quick feel test, not a measurement, so if you're between two, pick the one that sounds more like how your hair behaves.

Behaviour is the better clue anyway. The same study guide describes fine, straight hair as hugging the head with a small, narrow silhouette, and wavy, coarse hair as able to produce a very wide one ^[1]. Fine and thin are not the same thing: fine is the strand, thin is the count, and plenty of people have fine hair that's dense.

That's normal. Bounce Curl's explainer of the 1A–4C chart points out that most people have more than one hair type across different sections of the head, that the chart overlooks density and porosity, and that two people can classify the same curl pattern differently ^[2].

So use the code as shorthand, not a verdict. Tell your stylist the loosest and the tightest pattern you have and where each one sits, for example “2B at the front, 3A at the crown”. Fitcut's photo read accepts more than one texture, and you can correct it if it reads you wrong.

A quiz can only use what you tell it, so it's as good as your answers to the three checks above. The popular glass-of-water float test is something else: it's meant to judge porosity, not curl pattern, density or strand thickness, and we don't count it as evidence of anything a haircut depends on. Porosity isn't an input to Fitcut's catalog at all.

• Mixed patterns: one code hides the section that behaves differently, and that section often decides how a cut sits.
• Frequent straightening or relaxing: look at the roots, where new growth shows what your hair does on its own.
• Fine but dense, or coarse but sparse: the curl code says nothing about either, and both change which cuts work.
• Coily hair: so much length disappears into shrinkage that cuts are chosen by shape as much as by length. The coily hair guide covers the options.
• A thinning crown or a widening part: that's a density question first. See haircuts for thinning hair.

One sentence covers it: your pattern, your density, your strand thickness and how you dry it. For example: “My hair is 2B at the front and 3A at the crown, medium density, fine strands, and I air-dry it.” Then ask what that rules out.

The six cuts below show how differently the catalog handles texture and density, from cuts that take almost any hair to cuts with a narrow range.

Reading across, the textured crop takes any density and a wide range of curl patterns, the long one-length cut wants straight to lightly wavy hair at low to medium density, and the afro taper is built for coils. Each cut's page explains who it suits.

If you'd rather not judge it yourself, Fitcut's free analysis reads texture and density from one photo with a confidence level, asks whether that looks right (you can correct the curl pattern) and asks one question about how your strands feel. Hair fit, meaning curl pattern combined with density, carries the largest single weight in its ranking; the face shape detector covers the face side if you want it. When you book, the stylist guide has the words for length, layers and bangs.