How to Grow Out a Pixie Cut in 9 Simple Steps

Growing out a pixie cut can be challenging. With patience and the right care, you can navigate through the awkward stages. You can achieve a longer hairstyle.

The article provides an 18-month plan to grow out a pixie cut. It outlines nine phases from the initial shaggy stage to achieving shoulder-length hair. The plan includes regular stylist visits and tips on styling and maintenance. You should emphasize patience, regular trims, and creative styling. This will help you navigate the awkward stages of hair growth.

Here’s how to grow out a pixie cut in 9 steps:

1. A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing Out a Pixie Cut: First, understand that growing out a pixie cut is gradual. It requires patience and regular visits to your stylist every eight weeks.
2. The Shaggy Phase: Two months into growth, your hair will enter a shaggy phase. Trim the back to avoid a mullet look, focusing on maintaining a neat shape.
3. Flirty and Adorable: Trim the back every two months to keep it short and polished. Allow the front to grow.
4. Creative Accessorizing: During this challenging phase, use hats, clips, and headbands for styling. Trim the bottom layer in the back to progress towards a bob.
5. The Bob Phase: Once you reach bob length, consider adding bangs. This phase marks a significant milestone in the growth process.
6. The Awkward Phase: As your hair grows past your ears, it might look awkward. Trim the ends every two months to remove excess weight and maintain shape.
7. Shoulder-Length, Finally: Once your hair is past the shoulders, add layers for style and to help the hair appear longer.
8. Get Funky: Experiment with hair color and highlights as your hair grows longer. Continue trimming dead ends every two months.
9. Resist the Urge: Avoid the temptation to cut your hair short again. Add face-framing layers for style and to keep things interesting.

1. A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing Out a Pixie Cut

Are you trying to grow out your short hair? I feel your pain. I think I could write a book on the subject of growing out a short haircut. Now that I am almost 30, I have found the patience and restraint as well as the strength to talk myself down from a chop during desperate times.

Finally, with hair now past my shoulders, I am excited to share with you my tried and finally true guide to growing out your short haircut. Let’s start with a breakdown of grow-out phases from pixie to practically Rapunzel. Here is a very reasonable 18-month plan that if followed, can yield some pretty fantastic results. Let’s start by scheduling a trip to see your stylist every eight weeks!

We will also be sharing some great natural hair care tips to give it an extra boost, luster, and shine from time to time.

2. The Shaggy Phase

Ah, the pixie cut. Amazing when you love it, but horrible when you’re over it. Unfortunately, this cut will grow out into a mop-ish, shaggy mess in about two months, so make sure to have your follow-up haircut scheduled for eight weeks out. At that point, have your stylist trim the back of your pixie so that it hugs your neck, and texturize your cut throughout to add some much-needed movement. A little rule of thumb, the first four months of growing out a pixie cut is not about business in the front. It’s about the party in the back. The back of your cut should be kept as short as possible until the front pieces are jaw-length. This will keep you out of the mullet zone unless that’s what you’re going for.

3. Flirty and Adorable

This flirty and adorable haircut will look great for about another two months until your next trim. When you’re back in the chair, have your stylist cut the back short again, and give you just a quick shape up and trim. This will polish your cut and allow you to more easily transition into the next phases of hair metamorphosis.

4. Creative Accessorizing

This is the most challenging phase yet, but if you can make it through the next two months of weirdness, you’ll officially be in the clear. This portion of the grow out generally teeters between full-on mullet and shag. If you can time this phase to happen in the winter months, all the better! Regardless, have hats, clips, headbands, flowers and headscarves aplenty for creative accessorizing. After eight weeks, have your stylist trim the bottom layer in the back to get you working towards a bob. Don’t worry, it gets better from here!

5. The Bob Phase

Phew! Finally you have entered into bob territory. You made it past the first big hump, and you’re doing a great job. Now is the time for bangs! you will feel so much better with a little bob and bangs after all that mullet fuss. Discuss bang options with your stylist and don’t be afraid to get creative.

6. The Awkward Phase

Grow, grow, grow – dang it! Another challenging phase; the hair seems to just hang above the shoulders, taunting you with visions of pony tales. You can’t quite tie it up and it looks awkward down. After two more months, have your stylist trim it and remove excess weight from the ends to help you avoid that weird bell shape. How does hair even make that shape anyway? Yikes.

7. Shoulder-Length, Finally!

Finally, you are just past the shoulders! Revel in the fact that you now have the ability to style your hair instead of hiding it. When you’re back in the chair, have your stylist add some more layers to your cut. This will make your hair look longer and give it a shape that will more easily transition into the final stages of growing out.

8. Get Funky

Now that you’re almost there, why not experiment with your color? Now is the best time to get funky because you have four more months of growing without a lot of exciting haircut options. What’s on-trend? Highlights around the face? An ombre? After two months, you can have your stylist give you a quick trim to cut off any dead ends anyway.

9. Resist the Urge

Are you bored with your hair yet? For the love of all that is holy in this world, keep growing. Resist the urge to chop it all off again, you’re so close! Have your stylist give you some nice face-framing layers at your next appointment. This will give you some soft, pretty pieces to accentuate your face and make your hair a little more interesting to style up or down.

10. Bangs, Bangs, and More Bangs!

Well, by now your hair should be pretty dang long. Now is another great time to experiment with bangs. Try something fun and different, especially if you’re feeling the urge to chop. How about some angled bangs? Or maybe some baby bangs! Now that you have a mane to reckon with, your bangs will pretty much be your only outlet for haircut experimentation. After two months, get a trim-up on your ends. And for the rest of your grow-out process, make sure you are still trimming your hair every eight weeks in order to keep your hair healthy and help promote growth. Check out this tutorial on trimming your ends at home! Or, learn how to trim your ends yourself.

Now that you understand the phases of hair length during the process of growing your hair check out these 10 tricks to help you along the process, from short to long hair.

Growing Out a Pixie Cut Without Trims: A Step-by-Step Guide

Throw the Awkward Stage Out the Window

Growing out a pixie hairstyle can be tricky. How can you style your hair during that awkward “in-between” stage? Here’s my experience — I hope it helps you as you grow out your hair!

I chopped my hair off one Labor Day Weekend after being fed up with being a platinum blonde. I decided to go on a quest to go back to my roots and stop coloring my hair completely. That’s right. After building my reputation as a stylist around my skill for hair color and my own Barbie blond locks, I was going to go all-natural.

Even though I knew that meant I’d be (gasp!) a brunette. After a solid seven months with an ultra-short pixie, I found myself with my natural hair color and a desire to change again. When you have a pixie, the only option other than growing it out is shaving it off, and that wasn’t on my radar.

If there’s one thing I refused to have during the growing of my beloved pixie cut, it was awkward hair. I was not going to look like I was a snip away from a mullet or something Miley Cyrus might dream up. So, the first step in successfully growing out any short haircut is to find a hairstylist that you can trust. Someone that will take your growing hair out goal seriously, and understands how to transition a haircut from pixie to a bob, to wherever your heart desires without the dreaded awkward stage. It’s not rocket science, but a skilled stylist that understands hair growth patterns and how to properly shape hair for optimal growth is essential. Think about it. It just takes one bad haircut to set you back months in the hair growing process.

Speeding Up the Hair Growing Process

I have the patience of a hungry toddler, and my hair grows at a snail’s pace. I’ve always been envious of people that chop their hair and can grow it out in a matter of months. I’m lucky if my hair grows the average of 1/2″ per month. I know, because I’ve measured. I was more than interested in learning ways to speed up my own hair growth.

I already make a habit of some of the recommendations for faster hair growth, like taking vitamins, taking really great care of my scalp, eating a hair-healthy diet, and not coloring my hair.

Even doing all that, the hair on my head grows incredibly slow. I really wish that random hair on my chin and my leg hair would pass along a memo on growing faster, but since that was unlikely, I looked for a different solution.

On the recommendation of my stylist, I decided to give F.A.S.T. Shampoo and Conditioner a try. F.A.S.T. by Nisim is designed to feed your hair and scalp the hair building proteins and nutrients it needs for optimal growth. I was pleased with my results from using F.A.S.T., and you can check out a full review of the product here.

Six Months Later: Important Hair Growing Tips

Like I said, growing hair out can be a slow, almost painful process but I felt like I was finally getting somewhere six months later. While my hair was still short, it was a much longer crop cut. I continued to use F.A.S.T. Shampoo and Conditioner until this point (I stopped because I didn’t want to continue using the product during the dry winter months). During the winter I took extra care to deep condition my hair often to ensure that my ends didn’t get brittle, broken, and slow my progress.

Coconut oil is my favorite deep conditioning (and longest lasting) treatment.

Believe it or not, the other tip for getting the best results is to get your hair cut regularly. During the first six months, I visited my stylist every six to eight weeks to keep everything neat and prevent my hair from spontaneously turning into a mullet or some kind of awful shag. During this time, our focus was keeping the back short while the top and sides were allowed to grow into a nice shape and catch up with the back. This is truly essential for not having an awkward hair shape while growing your hair out.

Have Fun While Growing Your Hair Out

I think the best advice I can give you while growing your hair out is to have fun with it, no matter the length. I got compliments while growing my hair out at every stage in the process. I learned a lot of styling techniques with various lengths of hair. I learned how hair products worked differently on my hair at different lengths. I learned that I didn’t have to have long “updo worthy hair” to have fancy hair.

In this photo (which was taken approximately 8 months after I started growing my pixie haircut out), I used some of these tips to give myself a pompadour during a trip to Las Vegas. I loved my hair like this, even though I probably wouldn’t have picked this exact haircut out of a magazine, I rocked the cut and enjoyed it while it lasted.

Nine Months Later: It’s a Bob!

It took almost exactly nine months before I really felt like my hair was starting to take on a bob shape. Did I mention that my hair grows painfully slow? I think I did. I remember on this day when I left the salon, nine months after I decided to grow my pixie cut out, I felt like my hair had taken on a new bob shape and I was thrilled. At this point, I was able to extend my haircut appointments from every seven weeks to every ten weeks, as the shape didn’t come undone as quickly and it allowed my hair to grow more between salon visits.

One Year Down, Forever to Go

Hitting the one year mark of growing my hair out seemed to take an eternity, rather than twelve months. Considering that my hair was approximately 2″ in length at its longest point when I started, I guess I shouldn’t complain. I continued to play with style and texture. At this length adding, curl didn’t look as awkward, and flipping my hair out (like this photo illustrates) gave the illusion that my hair was longer.

The only complaint I really had with my hair at this length is that it was too short to put in a ponytail, and drove me absolutely crazy at the gym. I used a lot of hairpins and clips and headbands.

Hitting Big Milestones: the Pony & the Braid

I was able to pull my hair into a ponytail without the aid of clips and pins after growing my hair for 15 months, and could successfully french braid my hair at around 17 months. These were both really momentous days for me and meant that I no longer had to deal with hair in my face, although both styles at this point, are more functional than fashionable.

I’m still keeping my hair color completely natural, and I love the fact that I’m often accused of highlighting my hair.

The natural color is much lighter than I had imagined and has a ton of great blond highlights, most of which have been brightened by time in the sun. When those highlights turn silver, I’ll likely rethink my stance on coloring my hair, but for now, I absolutely love not having to deal with the maintenance of hair color.

Are You Bold Enough to Try a Pixie Haircut – Do You Like the Pixie Haircut?

What do you think about the pixie haircut? Is it a style you would try? Share your opinion here.

Photo Credit: Photo © Kendra Aarhus

Filed Under: Hairstyle Tutorials