To grow out a pixie cut without spending months fighting a mullet, ask your stylist to keep the nape tidy while letting the top and front gain length. Use clips, headbands, and a different part when the shape gets awkward. Aim for a bob as your first milestone, then let the length build from there.
The stages below follow a roughly 18-month grow-out, but your timeline will depend on your starting cut, texture, and growth rate. Shaping appointments can help the style look intentional along the way. They do not make hair grow faster. For realistic growth expectations, see Cleveland Clinic’s dermatologist-reviewed guidance.
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. Over time, 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’s the rough 18-month path I followed, but yours may move faster or slower. A good first step is scheduling a shape-up with your stylist and explaining that you want to keep as much growing length as possible.
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. Ask your stylist to leave the top and front alone where possible, rather than giving you an all-over trim.
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. If you want a change, this is a good time to discuss bangs with your stylist. They are optional, especially if your goal is to grow the front out too.
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 ponytails. 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. Ask for light, face-framing shaping if it suits your hair. Heavy layers can take away length you have worked hard to grow.
8. Get Funky
Now that you’re almost there, why not experiment with your color? If you miss changing your look, consider a new part, a temporary styling change, or highlights around the face. Color is optional, and bleaching can mean more breakage if your hair is already fragile.
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. Keep getting shape-ups when you need them, but you do not have to trim every eight weeks if the cut still looks good and the ends are in decent condition. Trimming helps manage split or damaged ends, not the rate of growth at the scalp.
My Pixie Grow-Out: Real Photos From Day One to 17 Months
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.
What I Tried While Waiting for My Hair to Grow
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 was already taking care of my scalp, eating a balanced diet, and avoiding hair color. I also tried vitamins, although dermatologists warn against taking hair-growth supplements without checking for deficiencies.
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. I was pleased with how my hair felt while using F.A.S.T., but I cannot say the shampoo made it grow faster. That would take more than my own grow-out photos to establish.
Six Months Later: Keeping the Shape
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 deep conditioned more often to keep my ends from getting brittle and breaking off.
Coconut oil was my favorite treatment for my dry ends. It helped me manage the feel of my hair, not speed up growth.
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. That made the transition easier for my particular cut. How often you need a trim depends on your shape and how your ends are holding up.
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
