You may have seen the Flowbee infomercial on late-night television. You may not have taken it seriously. After all, it’s hard not to laugh when you see someone vacuuming the hair on their head.
I thought the Flowbee looked like a fantastic product the first time I saw their commercial. Unfortunately, at the time I was a starving college student with no budget for extras like haircuts. So I had to wait awhile.
But a Flowbee was one of the first things I bought once I had a regular paycheck. And let me say, this product completely lives up to everything I expected from it.
What is it?
What is a Flowbee Home Hair Cutting System? How does it cut your hair? Can it give professional-looking haircuts?
This system has a set of blades that are built onto the end of a hose. The hose attaches to your vacuum cleaner. The blades have adjustable clear plastic spacers that keep them a set distance from your head. When you turn it on, the suction from the vacuum pulls a section of your hair up into the spacers and the blades automatically cut the hair. You then move the Flowbee’s spacer to the next section of your hair, and so on. It’s sweet because it can’t accidentally cut the hair shorter than the spacers. It physically can’t.
It takes a little practice
It takes some practice to get comfortable using the Flowbee. It’s easier to start by giving someone else a haircut (if you can find a soul brave enough to be your guinea pig). That way you don’t have to deal with the issue of everything being backwards in the mirror while you try to cut your own hair.
But in relatively short order I got confident using the Flowbee for cutting both my own hair, my brothers’ hair and my boyfriend’s hair. Mind you, my brothers laughed themselves silly every time I gave them a haircut. They had to admit the results were good. But they never got over the laughing thing.
Benefits
The Flowbee is fast! Much faster and easier than giving a haircut with scissors. And another cool benefit is that the vacuum automatically sucks up the bits of hair, so there’s no haircut mess to clean up. That means no itchy shirt as well.
I’ve been using a Flowbee for over 15 years now so I’ve had a chance to evaluate its durability. I’m still using the first one I bought. After 15 years of regular use the blades of my Flowbee are still sharp. The only part I’ve had to replace is a set of spacers to the tune of about $12 plus shipping.
Maintenance for a Flowbee consists of putting a few drops of oil (supplied with the product) on the blades every month or so.
Limitations
The Flowbee does have a few limitations to keep in mind.
You need a reasonably decent vacuum or you won’t get strong enough suction to pull the hair straight into the spacer. The average home vacuum cleaner will work fine.
The Flowbee is designed to cut hair of length ½ inch to 6 inches in ¼ inch increments. The manufacturer claims you can add more spacers to cut longer hair but I haven’t verified this myself.
I think the Flowbee works a little more efficiently on damp hair, but it’s not a big issue. If your hair is extremely thick and curly, you may find it works better to wet it first.
This system only cuts ½ inch of hair at a time, so one drawback in giving a haircut from really long to really short hair is that you have to cut it several times. However, each haircut is pretty fast, so it’s not as bad as it sounds.
I don’t know if a Flowbee haircut would work very well on African-American hair. I suspect not, but I’d love to hear from someone’s who’s tried that.
You will probably want to use scissors to trim around the ears at the end of the haircut. And you’ll still need to use a shaver on the neck area if you’re doing a really short haircut because the Flowbee cutter only goes down to ¼ inch.
Other uses
The Flowbee manufacturer claims you can use the Flowbee on your pets as long as you use their special Pet Attachment which keeps the pet’s skin in place. I tell you this only in the interest of completeness. I love my Flowbee, but it will never come near my cats.
Where can you get one
You can order the Flowbee Vacuum Haircutter direct from the manufacturer at www.flowbee.com. It costs around $60 plus shipping.
If you want to save money, you can look for a used Flowbee, but you may not find many. I think people who buy this product usually don’t want to part with it.
Summary
To summarize, the biggest benefit of the Flowbee is that it saves you a lot of time and money since you don’t need to go to a barbershop or hair salon to get a haircut every several weeks.
The biggest drawback of the Flowbee is that you won’t be able to tell anyone where you got your great new haircut. That is, unless you don’t mind them laughing so hard you need to throw a glass of water on them.
