You Don’t Need to Spend More Than $1 to Get a Great Claw Clip | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Catherine Kast

Catherine Kast is an editor who has been testing trendy products, such as claw clips and terrifying face masks, for 13 years.

As I developed my personal style in the late ’90s and early aughts, I loved dELiA’s catalogs and Limited Too, and my hair was always adorned with clips, from little butterfly clips to larger banana clips. So it’s not a surprise to me that I now own at least 15 claw-style clips as a full-grown adult.

Despite their suburban mall origins, they’re deeply functional; I have yet to find another style clip with the ability to swiftly sweep my hair off my neck in a way that is both elegant and relaxed. It’s so much less severe than a ponytail constricted by a stretchy elastic.

And once you remove the claw clip, there’s no dent in your ’do, unlike with so many other accessories. In fact, I find that my hair post-claw clip twist often looks as beautifully bouncy and voluminous as a second-day blowout.

Of course, what’s old is new again, and claw clips have made the transformation from quirky to cool. (If only the same could be said about all the fake band shirts and colored skinny jeans I bought in college.) My collection includes some classics, like a tortoiseshell clip and a pearlescent white one that wouldn’t look out of place on Lizzie McGuire.

But we’ve also gone so far beyond the butterfly in terms of novelty clips. I now have one shaped like a lobster and another like a tiny, shiny bunny; you might’ve seen girls on Instagram and TikTok with a hard plastic plumeria clip holding up their ponytails.

But in the sea of clips, there’s one that I’m always thrilled to stumble upon in the bottom of my purse: A Tocess Big Hair Claw Clip.

I was inspired to first buy them a couple of years ago when my colleague and senior staff writer Kaitlyn Wells recommended them. “I have long, curly—and sometimes unruly—hair,” she said. “The Big Claw Clips have become my go-to hair accessory for wrangling my curly hair come styling time or when it’s hot outside and I need to let my neck breathe. After two years, not a single clip has broken, and they do a bang-up job of staying put on nights I fall asleep with one in my hair.”

This pack of eight matte plastic hair clips includes two styles—a standard curved claw clip and a straight clip with a rectangular cutout—and they are surprisingly durable for the price. The clips hold many hair types well, but some people might find them too large.

Since then, I’ve bought several packs of clips and doled them out as gifts, including to my kid’s Gen Z babysitter and any friend who has hair longer than a bob. These matte plastic clips come in a pack of eight and cost less than a dollar each, so it’s not a huge extravagance, either. I keep a couple of them by my front door so I can grab one on the way out. Though it’s a plastic clip of dubious origin, it’s much stronger (and chicer) than it needs to be.

These clips open up to about 8.5 centimeters, or a little over 3 inches wide. My other favorite clip, Emi Jay’s Big Effing Clip, which costs exponentially more, has a hinge the same size but opens up only to 6.5 cm. I find that it’s relatively easy to squeeze the Tocess claw clip open with my fingers and kind of scoop my hair in, thanks to the angle of the hinge wings and the clip’s grippy matte finish, though one of my colleagues found it harder to hold open. “I have to squeeze so hard that the clip slips out of my hands,” software engineer Jasmine Khoury said.

The eight-clip set of Tocess claw clips comes with two designs: curved and flat. The curved clips grip my slightly wavy hair better than the straight flat ones because the teeth are rounded instead of flat, and the interior has extra little spikes on every other tooth. Even my mom, who is in her 60s and has self-described “fine, flat old-lady hair,” found them grippy enough to stay in for a few hours and only took it out to drive in her car (more on that below).

Senior staff writer Rose Maura Lorre, who wears the clips two to three times a week, gives another thumbs up to both styles. “I have very thick hair, and it does not slip out ever,” she says. “But I think the square cutouts are more chic.”

Jasmine also prefers the cutout-style clips to the rounded ones.

“I have curly hair, and it is very thick and heavy,” she says. “The square clip didn't slip out, and it lasted through an hour-long workout. I did squat jumps and it didn’t fall out, which is impressive. Because the teeth go straight across, I could even do lying-down exercises like crunches without getting poked in the back of the head.”

These clips are 4 inches long, making them the largest clips that I own. The size also makes them rather obtrusive when they’re clipped in the back of your head, so sitting in the car or on a high-backed chair is unpleasant.

Other colleagues found the clips tremendously hefty as well—and not always in a good way. “I really like the clip, and the hold is absolutely amazing, but sometimes I feel a little silly with it in, since it feels like it runs the whole length of my head, and my hair is short to begin with,” says updates writer Gabriella DePinho.

A tester with straight, fine hair also said the square clip felt “a bit heavy,” even though it stayed in for most of the day. “After a while, the weight became uncomfortable, and I could feel it tugging,” she says. “Clip weight is a reason I haven’t been a huge fan of clips in general.”

You can usually tell on first feel if a clip is going to last you a long time. I had a set of small, adorable floral clips from Marshalls that were so chintzy that they broke after just a couple of wears. I ended up shaking the little teeth out of my hair and tossing them all.

But the Tocess claw clips have lasted some of my colleagues at least a year, and for how inexpensive they are (we’ve seen them go as low as 75¢ per clip on sale), that’s a major win.

The prospect of a mound of tiny clip teeth piling up in a landfill reminds me of the hyenas sliding down bones in the elephant graveyard in The Lion King. I know that these claw clips will end up as trash eventually, but I’ve had a few of my clips since 2022, and if I could manage not to leave any more of them in Ubers or buried in various purses, I’m sure they’ll be keeping my hair off my neck for years to come.

This article was edited by Annemarie Conte and Maxine Builder.

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Catherine Kast

Catherine Kast is a senior editor at Wirecutter. Previously, she held editorial positions at People and the New York Post, so she has encyclopedic knowledge about Met Gala red-carpet fashion and appreciates a good pun. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, her daughter, and two Wirecutter-pick humidifiers.