Kitchen Shears Worth Buying (One Pair, Not a Drawer Full)

Most kitchens already have a chef's knife and a tired pair of office scissors in the junk drawer. Those scissors are dull, don't come apart, and somehow smell like packing tape — fine for cardboard, useless for dinner. The knife covers a lot, but it won't cleanly snip herbs into a hot pan or open a clamshell without a fight. If you're shopping for the best kitchen shears, you don't need a roundup of eight nearly identical pairs.

Short answer: Kitchen shears worth buying means one good take-apart pair — not a multi-pack of spring herb scissors and not non-separating $8 drawer shears. Reach for them when you'd rather snip than wrestle: herbs into the pan, bacon, raw poultry joints, pizza, parchment, and clamshell packaging.

What shears do better than your knife

A chef's knife still owns onions, herbs on the board, and most prep. Shears earn their hook when:

• You're snipping chives or parsley straight into a hot pan
• You're spatchcocking a chicken or cutting through joint cartilage
• You're portioning pizza without dragging toppings
• You're opening stubborn food packaging without hunting for a box cutter

If a task is awkward with a knife and messy with office scissors, that's a shears job.

Buy one pair that comes apart

The hinge is the whole product. Blades that separate clean after cutting raw chicken; blades that don't are a hygiene headache you will avoid using.

Opinion: One comfortable, take-apart pair replaces both the junk-drawer scissors and those novelty herb-scissors kits with eight tiny spring blades. Buy once, wash properly, stop browsing gadget sets.

Overall pick: OXO Good Grips Kitchen and Herb Scissors

For most home cooks, the overall pick is the OXO Good Grips Kitchen and Herb Scissors: micro-serrated stainless blades that grip slippery food, soft handles that don't punish your hand, and blades that pull apart for a real wash. Wirecutter and plenty of kitchen roundups keep landing here for everyday use — herbs, poultry, packaging, pizza — without asking you to spend upgrade money on day one.

Use them for weeknight snipping and poultry breakdown. Skip them if you already own a sharper premium pair you actually wash after every raw-meat job.

When an upgrade makes sense

If you cook whole chickens often, want longer blades, or prefer the extra bite of a premium pair, the Shun Multi-Purpose Kitchen Shears are the upgrade consensus pick — ATK's winner for a reason. They're ambidextrous, take apart for cleaning, and stay precise on herbs and parchment. The extras (bone notch, jar tools) are nice; the sharpness and length are why people pay more.

Don't buy the upgrade because a set looked complete online. Buy it when the OXO already proved shears belong in your rotation and you want more power and control.

What to skip

• Non-separating shears that live in the same drawer as tape and batteries
• Ultra-cheap multi-packs you'll never sharpen or fully clean
• Dedicated "herb scissors" with five parallel blades — fun once, annoying to wash, redundant if you have real shears

If your current pair can't come apart, treat them as packaging-only and keep them away from raw protein.

Care that keeps them in rotation

After raw meat, pull the blades apart and wash with hot soapy water; dry before reassembly. Don't toss locked shears in a crowded sink and hope. A quick rinse after herbs is fine; a real wash after chicken is not optional.

Store them with your knives or on a hook — not buried under can openers — so you actually reach for them.

One tool, fewer weeknight fights

You don't need a scissors collection. You need one pair that separates, grips food, and survives real cleaning. Start with the OXO; graduate to Shun only if your cooking asks for it.

When the spatchcock or roast that taught you to reach for shears still lives as a screenshot or stained card, Keepsake Cook can turn a photo of it into a searchable recipe for the next roast chicken night.