There are many different mohawk hairstyles such as a wide mohawk haircut, mohawk fade haircuts, mohawk burst fade, short mohawks, long mohawks, curly mohawks and more. The mohawk style changes in look by how the hair is cut on the sides and the length of the hair down the middle that comprises the mohawk.

You can have shaved sides, a low fade or taper fade on the sides. The mohawk hair length is often determined by how thick the hair is. If it’s thin, it’s best to have short hair. But with thick hair, you can have longer hair.

Styling the mohawk also contributes to the style, which can make it more modern or edgy. Mohawks can be on straight or curly hair. And why not pair a mohawk haircut with a touch of hair color.

The possibilities are vast. In this educational tutorial you will learn how to create a softer version of a wide mohawk using scissor over comb and a Feather Plier Razor. Watch this wide mohawk haircut tutorial below and follow along with the transcript below.

Wide Mohawk Haircut Tutorial:

Welcome to the Jatai Academy. I’m Russell Mayes Director of Content for Jatai. Today we’re going to be doing a wide Mohawk. We’re going to show you how to make the mohawk softer, how to make it harder, how to make it in between, basically how to make it more you. So let’s get started.

We have our Mohawk sectioned out, and I tried to get it as even on both sides as I could. And I wanted to keep this wide. Now I have a lot of variation and there’s a lot of different things that you can do on this depending upon what kind of look you’re going for.

I want something wide so I’m going from right at the corner of the eyes on the outer part all the way back down to the tendon and the neck. I want to try to keep that as straight through as I can and try to match that on both sides.

Now from here I’m going to go through and I’m going to cut all of this off and again you have a lot of variations on how you can deal with this hair.

We’re going to start from something that’s going to be very soft and then we can go to something that’s going to be very hard. So the harder that the end result is the more edgier that the look is going to be.

This is going to be a very edgy look regardless of how you cut it, but sometimes the hair demands a little softness in the cut. Sometimes it demands that it’s a little harder because the hair is a little frizzy or fuzzy and the harder textures work best.

Scissor Over Comb

So let’s start with just some basic scissor over comb. So I’m going to start with my Jatai Tokyo Scissors. This is a nice long skinny blade that makes it perfect for doing scissor over comb type of work.

Now when I have this much hair it’s senseless for me to go through and start my scissor over comb trying to get everything smooth with this much hair so I need to remove it. I can do the very very methodical method where I’ll take a vertical section and go through with my fingers and cut everything short.

If I need to practice my traveling guide that’s what I’ll do. And that would look like this. So I’ll take a vertical section at an angle, pull that out, finger length, support the blade, go through cut that straight up and down. And then my next section, the exact same size of parting as the first section. I comb these two together. Where that length is I’m going to follow that all the way through.

Next section, same size as the original two sections, comb everything into the previously cut section, cut that down and through. And then I can practice my traveling walking guide from front to back. Or I could do the more crude method where I just hold it up and cut some of this length off.

Since I’m going to be scissor over combing all of this length off anyway there’s no sense in me trying to work through all of that if I don’t need the practice. If I need the practice like on a mannequin head, definitely get the practice in.

Now I’m going to start going through and scissor over combing, going shorter around my perimeter hairline gradually getting longer as I go up. Here I’ll put my comb right in the crotch of my pinky and ring finger, thumb and forefinger on the spine and the teeth and then it’s this twisting motion here. So I want to get into a rhythm going down and then up, down and up, down and up.

And I’ll start very close at the nape, at the bottom perimeter of the hairline and gradually get longer. I’m not getting real long as I go to the top. I just want a little bit longer as I go to the top of the section. And I’m not worried about how perfect this is right now. I’m just going through the motions of getting everything removed and starting to build in my fundamental shape.

Now this is a very very crude shape but what it allows me to do is it allows me to start getting rid of the excess hair and start building in the type of tapering that I want. I don’t want to look at this as just lay the comb against the head and cut everything the same length as the comb all the way up. I want to have a little bit of a design aesthetic.

So I’m going to lightly taper it. So once I start to get the basic shape like I want, I have everything in the general vicinity of the length that I want. At that point, I will start to fine-tune my shape and fine-tuning my shape just means I’m going to go over and trace what’s already there. So I’m going to try to make as repeatable as possible the exact same length.

And sometimes I’ll cut some hair and sometimes I won’t. Sometimes it just glazes over and sometimes I get a little bit of hair to come off. And it’s not a matter of me visually having to see hair come off. It’s I’m looking at what’s being left. That’s the key thing. So I want to go through and make sure everything is as nice and as velvety smooth as I can possibly get.

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Cleaning this up around the hairline a little bit more making sure that’s nice and smooth and just go through. And anywhere that my eye visually sees something pop out, I want to go over and retrace that.

Now I can hear you saying ‘well why don’t you just go through and use the clipper to buzz everything off’ and I certainly could go through and do that and I have certainly done that many many times when the style and the aesthetic calls for it.

If I use a clipper it’s going to cut everything much more perfectly and the end result is going to be a much cleaner harder shape. So like I said, if the hair is fuzzy that cleaner harder edge works better.

If the hair is not and I want something softer, then scissor over comb will give me a softness to it that I can’t get from a clipper. And so I’m going to keep going over this until I have everything exactly like I want and as clean and as pristine as I care to do. Working the other side, we’re going to work the clipper. It’s the same thing I was doing with the scissor over comb, but this time the clipper.

Just lay the comb in, angle the comb at whatever type of graduation that I want, run the clipper across the comb. Now when I run the clipper across the comb, I don’t want to press the comb and make it move in. I just want to trace the comb with a gentle stroke across the teeth. I don’t want to try to push it in. If I push it in, it gets shorter than I think it does and then everything ends up a little bit too short.

So start here at the bottom working my way slightly longer as I get to the top of my parting. Make sure our sides are matching there. We’ve got a little bit right through there and the same kind of motion that I was doing with the scissor but this time using the clipper and it goes much faster which is good for time and good for speed. And it also gives me a stronger harder shape.

How soft I want this shape will determine what type of method or technique that I’m using to get everything fit in nice and smooth.

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Razor Cutting the Wide Mohawk Hair

We’ve gone through and taken a center section of our top all the way down through into the nape. I’m going to take this section. I’m going to pull it forward and up and out 90° from the head and I’m going to determine how short, where I want this to fall around the front. Determine where I want that section. Now I’m going to go through point cut that all the way through.

Take a small piece as my guide. Take my next flat section hold that 90° from the head, point cut that all the way through, take a small piece as my guide 90° from the head. Now once I hit the crown I’m going to start to increase my length. So the crown is right here. I’m going to start to gently increase the length and as I get further into the back, that length is going to increase quite a bit.

Still holding everything at 90° from the head. So I’m not dragging anything up, but I am increasing my length as I get down to the nape. 90 degrees there we go. Small piece is my guide. My next piece there’s my length all the way down and through. So now we’ve increased the length, but we still have it nice and short up here on top.

Now from here I’m going to comb the entire left side of the head into a combination of my first and second sections. Comb this up, follow my guide, original guide from the center of the head. Small piece is my guide. My next section held up at 90 again. There’s my guide from the center. Comb that through and over, small piece as my guide.

Once I reach the crown, remember my length increases so I look for that in my previously cut guide. And there it is right there still making sure that I’m holding everything as 90 as I can in the center of both of those two sections. Comb this up at 90, pull that through, follow that through. A small piece is my guide, center of both of those sections. There we go, cutting that through.

That’s looking pretty good. I like our length on top. We can still get that to stick up, but I like this length in the back as well. Now I’m going to go through and do exactly the same thing on the other side.

Now at this point I want to go through and use a razor. And since I’m using a razor, I’m going to use my Jatai Blade Glide just to give me a little bit of extra conditioning and to make sure that the blade glides through the hair and cuts really really evenly.

So I’m going to start here at the bottom in the nape, take a horizontal section. Now I’m going to go through and use my Feather Plier Razor. It gives me the cleanest cut. It’s a guardless razor so there’s no guard. So I have to be careful to not cut myself, but this will allow me maximum control of where I put my texture in each section.

So I’m going to comb this clean from the root all the way out and I want to go through and take out some of that weight and force these pieces to separate more tenderly.

Take another horizontal section. Do not pick up the previously cut section from underneath. Comb this section out and down. Take my blade, go through create internal texture and separation with my Feather Plier. Next section.

Work up. Do not pick up the underneath. And I’m just going to continue to do this until I reach the front run out of hair.

Final Look of the Wide Mohawk

Aright, here’s our end result. I think we’re looking pretty good. We got a little bit of curl in it to give it a little bit of bump and some separation. I got some clay into it to kind of give it some oomph to make it full and I think our shape looks pretty good.

We got it nice and wide from the corner of the eyes all the way straight down to the nape which gives us this wide full shape that can handle the curl really well.

You can certainly go straight and make it really really edgy and hardcore, but I think our shape looks pretty good. We got a nice little bit of curl to it and I’m very happy with that.

Check out the Jatai Academy. There’s all kinds of great information on there that will make you a better hairdresser and barber. Also let us know what you’d like to see in the future and thank you so much for watching. We’ll see you again next time.

Wide Mohawk Hair Cut Final Thoughts 

Whether you want to create a high or low fade mohawk or more modern mohawk hair styles, the mohawk cut has been around for a long time. Always, known for being an edgier cut, most mohawk styles for men are done with shorter hair these days.

Women can sport a mohawk as well, but it is much less common. With this tutorial, you can adjust your mohawk style for shorter hair down the middle and widen the mohawk even more for a more subtle mohawk style. There are many different styles for mohawks so get creative and enjoy the process.