Augmented reality · Interactive tool
AR Fade Trainer
Pick the finished cut first. The tool works backwards from it — where the line has to sit on the skull, which guards form the ladder underneath it, and what order the passes go in — then draws that plan on a real head through your phone's camera.
1. Name the finished cut
Everything below is derived from these three choices.
A child's ears sit differently against the eyes, which moves where the fade can start.
2. What that shape requires
Mid skin fade
The line sits halfway between the top of the ear and the parietal ridge, roughly level with the temple.
3. Put it on a head
The overlay follows the step selected above — the highlighted band is the pass you are on, and the amber arc is the angle to flick out at as you reach the top of it.
Point the camera at a mannequin head or a client. The overlay draws the fade line and the guard ladder on the head itself. Video is processed on your device and never uploaded.
Why start from the finished cut
Most people are taught a fade as a sequence: these guards, in this order, in these places. It works right up until the head in front of you is not the head in the demonstration — a flatter back, a lower ridge, a different texture — and then there is nothing to fall back on, because the sequence was never attached to a reason.
A fade is a shape, and a small number of decisions produce it. Where the line sits, how short the bottom goes, what length it has to reach by the top. Fix those three and the ladder in between is not a matter of opinion — it follows. That is what this tool does: you name the result, and it shows you the working.
The parietal ridge decides most of it
Run a hand up the side of the head and there is a corner where the side stops going up and starts going over. That is the parietal ridge, and it is the ceiling of every fade. A line below it has side left above it to blend into. A line on it has nowhere left to go, which is what makes a high fade high. A line above it is on a surface curving away from the clipper, which is why work up there stops reading as even no matter how carefully it was spaced.
It is also the hardest thing to point at in a book, because it is in a different place on every head. The overlay marks it on the head actually in front of you, which is the one thing a diagram cannot do.
What this tool does not do
It does not grade your work. It tracks the skull, not the hair — hair has no landmarks, it moves, and a single camera cannot judge depth through it. So the overlay is confident about where a line belongs and has no opinion at all about whether you hit it. Freeze a frame, hold it next to the target, and judge that yourself or with an instructor.
It also loses the head at the back. Face tracking needs a face, so the overlay works from straight on round to roughly three-quarters and stops there. The decision it exists to help with — where the line lands relative to the ridge — is made at the temple and the side, which stay in view.
And it does not know your client's texture. Curl pattern changes the relationship between the length you cut and the length that shows: tightly coiled hair can finish visibly shorter than the guard suggests, and unevenly so across one head. Treat the ladder as a starting spacing to be adjusted by eye, not a measurement.
This is craft, not a state board rubric
Guard ladders, line placement and the order of passes are conventions among barbers, not rules published by a regulator. No licensing board specifies them and no practical examination grades a fade against a protractor. For what an examination actually requires — the services, the kit and the scoring — go to the published requirements for your state rather than to this page.
Privacy
The camera feed is processed entirely in your browser. No video, image or face data is uploaded to this site or anywhere else, and nothing is stored unless you choose to save a frozen frame to your own device.