Grooming Awards 2023: The Best Hair Clippers for Men
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Hair clippers are one of those grooming tools that every guy should have in his arsenal, even if used infrequently. Tempting as it may be to buzz your head with a handy beard trimmer, most trimmers are designed to mow through thick clusters of hair. Attempting double duty here will likely just jam the trimmer and result in an inconsistent buzzcut. That said, if you want to consolidate your products, some beard trimmers can double as hair clippers, and we’ve included the best option in that department for you below, too. So, which of the best hair clippers are best suited for you? That comes down to budget, how often you plan to use it, and any specific fancywork you plan to do—like fading and clean edge work.
Read on for our picks for the best men’s hair clippers, whether you’re buzzing your noggin weekly, annually, or you’re a super-parent of three young boys who’s also looking to trim the family haircut tab. As for our year’s all-around best hair trimmer for men, that distinction goes to the Wahl Color Pro Cordless. In a sea of professional clippers and dubious-looking dupes, Walh’s device hits that sweet spot for DIY haircutting needs: high quality, fair price, and consistent results with plenty of customizable options.
Related: Stylists Say These Are the Best Ways to Cover Gray Hairs
How to Shop for Hair Clippers
While things like battery life and charging duration are important, let’s keep this valid consideration in perspective. Unless you’re a barber, you’re not going to need four hours of active time from a single device. While most brands like to impress with big numbers in terms of a clipper’s muscle, that stuff is really just noise. Sure, it’s cool to provide 100,000 cuts per minute, but what does that even mean to the consumer? Shop among reputable brands—like Wahl, Andis, Panasonic, BaByliss, etc.—and you’ll be fine with any non-professional tasks, since those are the brands barbers trust, too.
For at-home clippers, you’ll need to first consider the accessories that are important to you—namely, the guards and interchangeable attachments. If you want to draw clean lines across the sides, top, and neck, then a T-blade attachment will also be required. Another feature that’s important to many men is a device’s ability to “zero gap,” meaning the blades can be slightly readjusted to have no gap between them and provide a razor-thin trim. This is terrific for smooth fades and clean edge work, but please be careful with this feature at home.
As for those guard heads, make sure they’re clearly labeled—and, most importantly, that they’re durable. A device is only as great as its cheapest part. Those guard heads need to provide a steady, trusted buffer between the clipper teeth and your hair—no slipups or dipping whatsoever. So, our list of the best hair clippers excludes any products with flimsy, cheap guard heads.
Lastly, it’s nearly 2024—skip the corded options. While corded clippers are better for barbers who need constant power, wireless clippers are far less cumbersome and more ergonomic for the rest of us. Even if some cordless options have less kick to them, you’re just doing at-home buzz cuts and cleanups.
Related: The 12 Best Hair Products for Men
How We Tested
At Men’s Journal, we’re constantly testing the latest products, some of our team with more than a decade of grooming coverage under their belt. Whenever something enters the marketplace, it’s also at our desks, and quickly being tested. Think of us as grooming lab rats; we get to enjoy the spoils when something is really great, and endure the agony when a product isn’t up to par.
Best Hair Clippers of 2023 1. Best Overall Hair Clippers: Wahl Color Pro Cordless Rechargeable Hair Clipper 
For 40 bucks, this quality clipper could fool anyone into thinking they’re an actual barber—given how clear and intuitive Wahl makes the task. Offering 10 different colored-coded clipping lengths, as well as angled guard combs to navigate around the ears, let’s just call this “clipping by numbers.” It works cordless or corded, and holds an hour-long runtime unplugged. Lots of us grew up with the corded version of this one, and it remains as reliable as ever to this day.
[$40; amazon.com]
2. Best Hair Clippers Upgrade: Braun Series 7 Hair Clippers (Model 7390) 
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This fantastic clipper consolidates all of its 17 trimming lengths (1 to 35 mm) between two very sturdy guard attachments, thanks to an adjustable lever on the spine of the device. It holds a 50-minute charge on just an hour of charge time, and you can juice it up enough in five minutes for a quick buzz cut. A lock will mark your preferred settings in place when you need to remember that precise length for your next buzz—and to ensure you don’t accidentally transition from one length to a much shorter one mid-shearing.[$70; amazon.com]
3. The Best Hair Clipper/Beard Trimmer Hybrid: Panasonic Multishape 
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Panasonic’s customizable device is terrific as a beard trimmer, hair clipper, body groomer, and even as a simple foil shaver. In other words, it’s perfect for those who want to consolidate their buzzing regimen into a single, reliable, multipurpose tool. We suggest the hair/body/beard attachment as your baseline (with 58 different clipping lengths!), but hope you’ll consider adding on the dedicated beard trimmer (39 lengths!) and the shave attachment, too. Be sure to choose the lithium ion battery base, as it’s just 10 bones more than the Ni-MH base, and will provide much more power and active time.
[$100; shop.panasonic.com]
4. The Best Luxury Hair Clippers: BaBylissPRO LoPROFX Collection Clippers 
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Here’s a professional-grade clipper that even your barber will envy. BaBylissPRO’s ergonomic-grip device holds a muscular clip for two hours unplugged, and can be zero-gapped for super-clean edge work. The graphite wedge blade resists forward movement or overheating, and you can angle it five different ways in order to get the right approach on your head (or your friend’s). It comes with eight guard attachments to trim anywhere between 1 to 19 mm.
[$190; amazon.com]
5. The Best Travel Hair Clippers: Wahl Professional Peanut Cordless Hair Clipper Kit 
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The Peanut is a too-cute lightweight clipper-trimmer hybrid. Don’t count on it as your sole hair clipper, but do tuck it into your Dopp kit for easy on-the-go cleanups. It requires two AA batteries, and has four guard combs for varied lengths, with 1/8″ to 1/2″ options.
[$65; amazon.com]
6. The Most Ergonomic Hair Clippers: Remington Shortcut 
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The Shortcut is perfect for frequent self-buzzers—you know, the guy who wants to maintain his tennis-ball cut every single day. Slip-proof, it fits right in your palm, and is easier to navigate around the head compared to longer and traditional clippers designed for barber use. It also has a slight curve to its wide smile that helps wrap the head easily. Use it while traveling, or even in the shower. It comes with nine guard combs that let you graduate from 1 mm all the way up to 15 mm.
[$60; amazon.com]
7. The Best Outliner Hair Clippers: Andis Professional Cordless T-Outliner 
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Andis’s T-blade clipper is the king of clean edge work. Essential for anyone who maintains a DIY lineup, it can even be zero-gapped to increase its proximity to skin. It’s not a regular hair clipper on its own, so only get it if you need those straight lines on a regular basis. As a bonus, it’s brilliant for beard necklines, too—and for snipping mustache curtains off the top lip.
[$108; amazon.com]
