Best Free Hairstyle Apps – Rated Worst To Best By A Professional

Free Hair Apps

Hairstyle apps can be a beneficial tool to use before your next salon appointment!

While your stylist can tell you a million times that specific colors or cuts won’t match your features, some of us don’t listen. Seeing a visual description of what your stylist is trying to tell you can save you time and overall some big bucks!

Before we begin, the best part of using these apps is that no hair ties or other accessories are required! All of these are done on your mobile devices.

Hairstyle apps can additionally be a fun way to simply switch up your social media content, without having to make a drastic real life change! Go ahead and match your hair to your cotton candy snack! Life is short, so just live it up and ignore haters who call you out on photoshopping colored hair. Tell them to make like a tootsie and roll on outta your Instagram feed.

Before we begin, to obtain a 100% free hairstyle app with no in-app purchases is quite a hard thing to do. I will make sure to be transparent with you throughout this post on precisely what is free within the apps and what might be an additional charge! Sometimes they are 100% free and will ask if you want to pay $0.99 to remove ads or watermarks.

Remember, I am ranking these from Worst to Best! I personally have tried all these apps so you don’t have to waste the time going through them individually. I will give the Apple store rating which is a 5-star scale, 5 stars being the best!

Contents

1. Hair Styler App Perfector Review 

Personal Rating out of 10: 0

Apple Store Rating: 0 stars out of 4 reviews

Cost

This is a 100% free hairstyle app to use, with ads that pop up after about the 4th or 5th hairstyle you try on. Ads will continue to run until you click off of them. You can pay $0.99 to use the app without ads, but the app itself isn’t even worth that much.

How To Use It 

You can either upload a picture you have in your camera roll already or you can take a photo of yourself via the app. Once the photo is uploaded you click the left or right arrows to change the hairstyle.

Features

Hairstyles are premade and are non-adjustable in any way. You will have to pinch the picture with your fingers and adjust your face to fit in the hole. The problem is the hole changs shapes in each picture and the pictures are irrelevant from one to the next. The hole is sometimes within the face but sometimes takes up the neck space as well making it un-proportional even if you do zoom in all the way onto your face.

Some pictures are up close just showing a face, some are far away with a full-body, some have just a headshot with the upper body and others have a full body in the frame.

A few of the preset pictures are meant to show you wedding hairstyles and some show you different hair colors or styles. This app doesn’t quite know what it wants to be and it is so outdated in functionality and in the style provided it isn’t even worth your phone space to download.

Additional Features – NOPE

This is all you can do with the app, besides buttons on the bottom allowing you to share it to your socials, which could give your followers a reason to laugh for the day. Your poor photo editing is another persons pick me up for the day so be a kind person, and share these pictures!

2. Hairstyle Try On 

Personal rating out of 10: 3

Apple Store Rating: 2 stars out of 131K reviews

Cost

This specific app is free but they do have packages you can purchase in-app. Female package for $0.99 includes 76 mixed hairstyles, Female extra package for $2.99 includes 369 hairstyles, Formal updos for $1.99 includes130 styles or 40% off when you buy all 5 packages they offer for $4.99.

This is not to be confused with the $2.99 app Hairstyle Try On PRO, they are two different apps!

Package Features

The packages have some fresh hairstyles and might be worth the upgrade to see what a specific color or length would look like on you. At first glance, there are some out of date hairstyles, but they actually have a decent amount of trendy ones as well! Each hairstyle itself can be adjusted and changed into a large variety of hair colors. It’s not just black, brown, red, or blonde they offer multiple shades of each color and vibrant, fun colors as well.

How To Use It

Like the above app, you can upload your own picture or you can take one through their camera. This one has you adjust your face into the set eye holes which matches your face shape to the preset face it has. It holds your body and head in the same sport and instead of fitting your face into a hole you can adjust the hairstyle to fit around your head! The picture is of your face and upper body so you can see how the hairstyle would fall around your actual body and not just a preset fake body.

Once the holes are lined up you click packages, press examples, and a grid will appear with all the different layouts of hairstyles with your picture.

Additional Features

Click on one of the hairstyles and it will inlarge it into your entire screen. From there you can choose to keep the background as is or blur it out. If you hit hair color you can choose from a large range of shades. Hit the style info button and it will inform you of the hairstyle information including:

  • What the example of hair type matches – density wise
  • How to style that hairstyle
  • Helpful tips

There is an export button on the bottom as well so you can save it or share it directly with your friends or stylist.

Overall this isn’t a bad app. Since I am only reviewing the free version, I’m only giving it three stars, which is genuinely being nice. The hairstyles in the free version are horrible, comical, useless, and out of date. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve seen any of them as an actual hairstyle lol. The color shown is very fake, and over shiny, which isn’t how it would appear once your hair is colored. They could tone down the shine level a bit to be more realistic.

I do like how you can get a GENERAL sense of what a specific color may look like on you. I also LOVE that you can adjust the hair to fit around your face and upper body and you don’t have to cram your face into a hole that sits on top of someone else’s body shape that is nowhere similar to yours.

From a stylist standpoint, this a great tool to show clients different color shades next to their actual skin tone, as well as different hairstyles paired with their real face shape! You can tell a client something isn’t going to suit them until you are blue in the face but showing them can finally make that lightbulb go off in their head.

3. Hair Alone: Hairstyle Makeover App  – Best Hair Style App

Personal Rating Out of 10: 8

Apple Store Rating: 2.9 Stars out of 10 reviews

Cost

This hairstyle app is free overall. You can purchase a one-month hair subscription for $1.99 or a one-year hair subscription for $9.99.


This is so much more than just a hairstyle app, and it can be a bit overwhelming at first glance. This app has a hair analysis feature, a makeover feature, videos, quotes of the day, hair tutorials and so much more!

How To Use It 

This is an app that takes a bit to set up, but with the amount of time people spend on their phones the set up can take about the same length as you spend waiting in line for coffee.

You need to first set up an account and then you need to allow the app to access multiple features on your phone such as your calendar, your reminders, and your Icloud.

When I tried to go back into my app after initially setting it up I did have trouble logging in, so I’m not sure if it is me a.k.a user error, or if it’s the app.

Once you have registered with your email you will need to take a hair quiz, which will helps the app create a profile specifically for you!

The hair quiz takes just a minute to fill out!

Once your account and profile are all set up then its time for you to play!

Hair Analysis Feature 

This feature analyzes your face and gives you a hairstyle based off of your specific face shape. At the end of the analysis, it gives you haircut styles that best suit you and describes the reasoning behind it. Scroll around and it will show you long hairstyles, short hairstyles, bang options and even formal updos that would look best on you!

Hair Makeover Feature 

So here’s the thing, I have a love-hate feeling with this feature. The makeover feature section is the department you can play with different hair colors. My little pet peeve is you have to align little hair dots and outline your entire hair in order for it to work. You can add more dots to make it easier but you can’t zoom in on the picture, so placing the tiny little dots takes super long and your fingertip covers the actual dot you are trying to move so you have to sort of guess where you’re placing them.

There is a neat option that allows you to order a specific color you try on, but as a professional, I never recommend box hair color so I find that to be a tremendous No Bueno. An app that promotes people to color their hair at home is being a bit irresponsible to hair and the users well being.

I gave up after a bit with the outlining of the hair, so as you can see my entire hair isn’t technically colored in. I can see where it would be pretty spot on though if you take the time to outline your hair and that alone earns a perfect 10 stars from me!

As you can see some colors blend better than others over the filter. You can adjust colors and make your own if you don’t fancy one of the preset shades! Fashion and standard colors are available to try on.

From a stylist standpoint, this is an awesome app for someone to use! It would be most ideal for clients to come in with this already downloaded from the app store, account made and pictures uploaded with pre-saved colors already put on.

4.Best Hairstyles Step By Step Pictures 

Personal Rating out of 10: 2 (has the potential to be 10)

Apple Store Rating: 4.3 out of 47 ratings

Cost

It is a free hairstyling app, but there are ads that will pop quite frequently. You can’t have it both way though my friends. You either pay for an app with no ads or you use one for free and have to sit through them; you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

This is a bit of a different kind of app than the previous ones we went over. It isn’t a makeover app but it is more of a hair tutorial app.

How It Works 

Once you log in it shows you a photo library of pictures you can scroll through. Some of the hairstyles are relevant, and some are just straight out fugly. A few of these hairstyles seem like filler pictures to just build their library and don’t seem very put together.

example of hairstyles

Not Practical 

The idea of this app is fabulous! However, the problem comes in the actual functionality of the app. As you scroll and click around, you will notice there are no words to be found anywhere!

How is a tutorial app containing zero words suppose to help people understand how to do the hairstyle?

Even if it included simple sound bites stating a list of the tools used, products needed to achieve the hairstyle, and simple hand techniques then people could use common sense and try to figure it out on their own. An ideal slide would be a full video of how to do the hairstyle with the step by step slides following after.

Hairstyle apps

The developers should have invested more time into the app before launching it. Simple things like putting words with the pictures could guide people. More photos need to be added for missing steps in some of the style breakdown slides because a lot of the styles go from one image to the next without showing critical steps in between. What’s the point of a step by step app if they aren’t going to show all the proper steps needed?

After scrolling through the app it would be helpful for people to know they are going to need multiple tools to achieve these hairstyles. I suggest a 5-in-1 curling wand for the majority of these styles!

Additionally, it would be helpful if they included a slide that listed the tools and products needed to complete the style. No hairstyle is EVER achieved without the help of tools and products; people who tell you otherwise are liars.

From a stylist standpoint, they should divide these slides into two categories: styles you can do yourself and styles you can do on others. Even the best hairstylist can’t do every style on their own head and need some help from a friend.

If these developers don’t update the app, I’m sure someone else is going to come in with a more in-depth app similar to this and crush them out of the water. If only I knew how to code apps…

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