Cutz Legal
Community & Review Guidelines
The short version
- Only review a service you actually received. Cutz only lets you review after a barber marks your service complete.
- Rate the service, not the person. A slow cut is fair comment. An insult is not.
- Nobody can buy a review. Salons must not offer discounts, free cuts, or anything else in exchange for a rating.
- We remove fake, abusive, and off-topic reviews — but we do not remove a review just because a salon dislikes it.
- Your review is public and permanent. It stays visible even if you later close your account, though we anonymise it.
These guidelines form part of the Terms of Service.
1. Who can leave a review
1.1 You can review a barber and salon after a service at that salon has been marked complete in the app. This is deliberate: it means every review on Cutz is tied to a real, recorded service.
1.2 You need a Cutz account to leave a review.
1.3 You can review the same barber again after a later service. Ratings reflect a history, not a single visit.
1.4 Walk-in customers who were added to a queue without an account cannot leave a review for that visit. Create an account and join the queue yourself next time.
2. What a review consists of
| Part | Required? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Star rating, 1 to 5 | Yes | This is what feeds the aggregate rating |
| Written comment | No | Free text about your experience |
| Quick tags | No | Short preset labels such as "Great fade" or "On time" |
2.1 Reviews are shown publicly on the barber's profile and the salon's profile, with your first name and the date. Your phone number, email address, and full name are never shown.
2.2 Ratings are aggregated at both barber and salon level and shown in discovery.
3. What makes a good review
- Be specific. "The fade was sharp and he took his time on the line-up" tells other customers more than "good".
- Be recent and first-hand. Write about the visit you just had, not something you heard.
- Be fair about what the salon controls. A long wait caused by the salon is fair. A long wait because you arrived an hour after your notification is not.
- Separate the barber from the shop. If the cut was excellent but the shop was hot and crowded, say so — the barber and the salon are rated separately.
4. What we remove
We may hide or remove a review, and where necessary act against the account, if it:
4.1 Is fake or not based on a real experience — including reviews written by the salon, its staff, their friends and family, or a competitor.
4.2 Was paid for or incentivised — written in exchange for a discount, a free service, cash, or anything else of value.
4.3 Is abusive, threatening, or harassing.
4.4 Is hateful or discriminatory on the basis of ethnicity, state of origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any other protected characteristic.
4.5 Is defamatory — an allegation of fact that is untrue and damaging, such as accusing a barber of a crime without basis.
4.6 Is obscene or sexually explicit.
4.7 Contains personal information — anyone's phone number, address, workplace, photograph, or identity details, including the barber's personal contact details.
4.8 Is off-topic — about politics, the weather, the neighbourhood, a different business, or Cutz itself. Send feedback about Cutz to hello@cutz.ng.
4.9 Is advertising or spam, including promoting another salon or a link.
4.10 Concerns a dispute that is not about the service — for example a personal disagreement, or a matter currently before a court.
4.11 Is duplicated across multiple accounts or posted repeatedly to move a rating.
4.12 Is part of coordinated manipulation, whether to inflate one salon or attack another.
5. What we do not remove
5.1 We do not remove a review simply because it is negative, because a salon disagrees with it, or because a salon asks us to.
5.2 We do not edit the substance of a review to make it more favourable.
5.3 A one-star review that follows the rules stays up. Honest criticism is the point of a rating system.
6. Rules for salons and barbers
If you run a salon or operate a queue, you must not:
6.1 Write, commission, or arrange reviews of your own business.
6.2 Offer a discount, free service, gift, or any other benefit in exchange for a review, a rating, or the removal of a review.
6.3 Ask a customer to change or delete a review as a condition of service, a refund, or anything else.
6.4 Threaten, penalise, refuse service to, or retaliate against a customer because of a review.
6.5 Review a competitor, or arrange for anyone to do so.
6.6 Filter which customers you invite to review — for example, only prompting customers you know were happy.
6.7 Contact a reviewer outside the Services using contact details you obtained through Cutz. That also breaches the Acceptable Use Policy and the Privacy Policy.
6.8 Display a Cutz rating in your own marketing in a misleading way — for example quoting an old rating as current, or a barber's rating as the salon's.
Breaching these rules can result in reviews being removed, your rating being withheld, your listing being removed from discovery, or your account being terminated. Paid subscriptions are not refunded on termination for breach.
7. Responding to a review
7.1 We may introduce a feature allowing salons and barbers to reply publicly to reviews. Until then, salons should resolve complaints with the customer directly and in person.
7.2 When responses become available, the same standards apply to a response as to a review: no abuse, no personal information, no retaliation.
8. Reporting a review
8.1 Anyone can report a review that breaches these guidelines. Use the report control in the app where available, or email hello@cutz.ng.
8.2 Tell us which review, why you think it breaches the rules, and any evidence. "It is untrue" is not enough on its own — tell us what actually happened.
8.3 We aim to review reports within 7 business days. Serious reports — threats, hate speech, sexual content — are prioritised.
8.4 We may leave the review up, hide it pending investigation, remove it, or remove it and act against the account.
8.5 We do not adjudicate factual disputes between a customer and a salon. Where a review makes a serious factual allegation that we cannot verify and that the salon disputes credibly, we may remove it in the interest of fairness — but we will not do that routinely.
8.6 Filing reports in bad faith to suppress honest criticism is itself a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy.
9. Ratings and how we calculate them
9.1 A barber's rating and a salon's rating are averages of the ratings they have received.
9.2 We may exclude, discount, or recalculate ratings we reasonably believe are the result of manipulation, and we may withhold a rating from display until a barber or salon has enough reviews for the average to be meaningful.
9.3 We do not guarantee any rating, ranking, or level of visibility, and we may change how ratings are calculated or displayed. Discovery ranking also takes account of distance, availability, queue length, and — for some plans — subscription tier, as disclosed in clause 3.7 of the Terms of Service.
10. Your review after you leave
10.1 If you close your Cutz account, your reviews are anonymised rather than deleted. Other customers relied on them and the aggregate rating would otherwise shift misleadingly.
10.2 If you want a specific review taken down, ask us at hello@cutz.ng and tell us why. We will consider it against these guidelines and your rights under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023.
11. Changes to these guidelines
We may update these guidelines. The current version is always at cutz.ng/legal/guidelines. Material changes take effect on at least 14 days' notice.
Cutz Community & Review Guidelines · Version 1.0 · Drafted 31 July 2026 · Effective 2 August 2026