Hair clipper with motorised cutting guide

[0001] This patent application is the National Stage of International Application No. PCT/BE2006/000069, filed Jun. 20, 2006, that claims the benefit of European Application No. 05447164.4, filed Jul. 7, 2005.

[0002] The present invention relates to the area of hairdressing, and in particular to hair clippers having a cutting guide with motorised regulation and driven by a program providing the user with different cutting options.

[0003] Hair clippers with cutting guides allowing to manually regulate the length of cut of the hair are well known from the state of the art. These are usually a guide that the user positions once and for all to a given length of hair, which often remains constant during the entire haircut. The cutting guide is moreover mainly intended for non-professional users who generally find it difficult to estimate the length of cut required on the different parts of the scalp.

[0004] The present invention aims to provide a clipper having a motorised cutting guide with instructions that allows to automatically adapt the position of the cutting guide depending on the part of the scalp to be processed by means of an electronic device (microprocessor or simply a circuit comprising at least a transistor and/or a diode) for adapting the position of the cutting guide to the part of the scalp processed by the user.

[0005] The present invention discloses a hair clipper with a device for regulating the position of a cutting guide, motorised and driven by an electronic device, which automatically adapts the position of said cutting guide depending on the cutting option selected by the user.

[0006] According to the invention, the electronic device is a circuit comprising a transistor and/or a diode.

[0007] The clipper preferably comprises pictograms showing the user the options for different haircuts.

[0008] As an advantage, said regulation device is incorporated into the housing of said hair clipper.

[0009] In addition, said device comprises a shaft connecting said cutting guide to the motor.

[0010] The shaft is preferably a worm screw.

[0016] The motorised cutting guide of the present invention is intended to simplify the use of hair clippers 12 for non-professional users. Inside the housing 14, it comprises a motor 16 connected by a shaft 18 to the cutting guide 10. The cutting guide is driven by the motor 16 which is controlled by a program available via a microprocessor suggesting various options to the user. These options are presented to the user on a screen 22 such as that shown in FIG. 2.

[0017] The options suggested to the user include the manual mode and the automatic mode. The manual mode is set by default. The user selects, using at least one button 24 (see FIG. 5), the length of cut by means of the “UP” and “DOWN” buttons from the at least one button 24. The motorised cutting guide 10 then automatically shifts to the desired position.

[0018] In the automatic mode, the clipper 12 provides the user with various haircut options symbolised by pictograms 20 displayed on screen 22 (see FIG. 2 and FIG. 5). The user selects, using the at least one button 24, the average height of this cut, for example short, medium or long. Lastly, the clipper shifts the cutting guide 10 to the desired height and displays the area of the scalp to be processed. This operating mode allows many combinations of length of haircut, providing many possible hairstyles.