The honest workhorse stainless — tough, forgiving, cheap to sharpen, and the right steel to learn on.
440C is the steel a lot of stylists start on, and there’s no shame in that — it’s one of the most widely used shear materials in the world precisely because it gets the fundamentals right at a sensible price.
440C is a high-carbon chromium stainless, usually hardened to around HRC 58–60. That’s softer than VG-10, and the practical consequence is honest: the edge needs refreshing more often, perhaps every three to six weeks at salon volume. In exchange you get toughness. 440C is far less likely to chip when a tired apprentice drops a pair on a tiled floor, which makes it the sensible choice for training and for cutting coarse, thick hair where a brittle premium edge can micro-chip.
It’s also the easiest professional steel to sharpen, so servicing is cheap and you can hand it to almost any sharpener.
This is the entry to the value tier. You won’t get the edge longevity of VG-10 or cobalt, but you get genuine professional manufacturing, a real convex edge, and a tool that survives the learning curve. Vacuum heat treatment (as Yasaka uses) noticeably improves how consistent a 440C edge is from pair to pair.
Mina builds its sub-$150 range on hot-forged 440C, which is exactly why it’s the entry-level shear we recommend instead of a stamped beginner pair. Yasaka pairs 440C with vacuum hardening for its famously consistent mid-range workhorses, and Ichiro uses it on its value models before stepping you up to VG-10. When you’re ready for longer edge life, see VG-10.