The Day Rate Guide to Hairpins
By Aviva Jansen Perea, celebrity hairstylist and founder of Day Rate Beauty
Day Rate exists because I spent more than twenty years doing hair professionally and could not find the tools I actually needed.
On set, backstage, at weddings and editorial shoots, I was constantly improvising. Using too many pins to get one style to hold. Watching clips and elastics create breakage, dents, and tension in hair I'd just spent an hour working on. Searching for pins that blended into a full range of hair colors and textures, only to find the same limited, generic options again and again. The products available were often functional but ugly, pretty but weak, or simply not designed by anyone who actually understood how hair works.
Day Rate came from that frustration. Every pin in the line is something I wanted in my own kit and couldn't find anywhere else.
Here is what that means in practice.
Made in the United States
Every Day Rate pin is manufactured in the United States. This is a deliberate choice, not a marketing angle. It keeps our carbon footprint small by reducing the distance between manufacturing and customer. It supports American makers and craft. And it keeps us entirely insulated from the tariff volatility that affects so many imported accessories.
When you buy a Day Rate pin, it was made here.
Plastic-free, from the inside out
No plastic anywhere in the line. The core of every Day Rate pin is made from upcycled stainless steel. The coating is a plant-based nylon derived from castor seeds: the seeds are pressed, the oil is extracted and used to create the nylon coating, and the remaining pulp is returned to the soil to fertilize future crops. It is a fully regenerative process.
This matters for the hair as much as it does for the planet. Standard bobby pins and hairpins are often coated in paint that chips over time, or tipped with plastic that peels and then catches on the hair. Once that tip is gone, the exposed metal snags on the strands going in and coming out. Day Rate pins have no peeling tips, no chipped coating, and no plastic edges. The coating is smooth all the way through, which means the pin goes in cleanly and comes out the same way, every time.
Color-matched to real hair
Day Rate pins are color-matched to real hair tones across the full spectrum, from the lightest blondes to the deepest blacks and every shade in between. The goal is a pin that disappears into your actual hair color, because a pin that only works for a narrow range of tones is not a professional tool. It is an oversight.
In my kit, a pin that sits on top of the hair and competes with the style is not a pin I can use. The hardware should be invisible. What people see should be the style, not what's holding it together.
The pins
Power Pin
The Power Pin is the largest pin in the line, designed for thick, long, or heavy hair and full buns. It is long enough to pass through the full depth of a dense bun and reach the anchor point at the base, which is where the hold actually comes from. If you have a lot of hair and have always felt like pins just aren't strong enough, the Power Pin is built for exactly that.
Best for: thick hair, long hair, heavy hair, full buns, maximum hold.
Petite Power Pin
The Petite Power Pin is a smaller version of the Power Pin, designed for fine to medium hair, smaller buns, half-up styles, and everyday quick styling. It gives real structural hold without being too much pin for a smaller amount of hair. This is the pin most people with fine or medium hair reach for every day.
Best for: fine to medium hair, smaller buns, half-up styles, everyday styling.
Foundation Pins
Foundation Pins are designed for building structure in updos. They are the pins a professional stylist uses to create the internal architecture of a style before finishing it. They go in first, invisibly, and hold everything in place underneath. If you have ever had a professionally styled updo that seemed to defy gravity, Foundation Pins are usually part of how that works.
Best for: building structure in updos, invisible support, securing complex styles.
Hero Pins
Hero Pins are the Day Rate version of the traditional bobby pin, redesigned to do that job properly. Plastic-free, smooth-coated, and built for detail work: flyaways, small sections, finishing touches, and the precise jobs that a larger pin is too unwieldy for.
Best for: detail work, flyaways, securing small sections, finishing.
Min Pins
Min Pins are the smallest pin in the line, designed for shorter hair, children's hair, and situations where you need subtle hold in a very small amount of hair.
Best for: shorter hair, small sections, children's hair, delicate styling, subtle hold.
The standard
The category that Day Rate sits in has, for a long time, been treated as cheap, disposable, and not worth thinking about. Products designed to be replaced rather than kept. Tools that damage the hair they are supposed to hold. Accessories built to a price point rather than a performance standard.
That is not what I wanted to build. The standard I hold every Day Rate pin to is the same standard I held the tools in my professional kit to: real hold, clean release, no damage to the hair, no compromise on materials, and a design that is thoughtful enough to disappear into the style rather than fight with it.
Better for your hair. Better for the planet. That is not a tagline. It is the reason the brand exists.
For a deeper look at technique, how to choose between the pins, and how to use them across different hair types and styles, the Complete Guide to Hairpins covers everything in one place. For a more detailed breakdown of which pin suits your specific hair, Which Day Rate Pin Is Right for Your Hair? walks through each one side by side.
Browse the full line at dayratebeauty.com/collections/pins.
xo, Aviva
