Upper lip hair is not much fun if you are a girl who likes to look good. I came across a forum post the other day where a woman had been shaving her upper lip since the age of 11 and now has a real 5 o’ clock shadow problem every day.

Do not do this, girls!

If you have a mustache problem you want rid of, it’s time to scrimp and save and get together the money and get yourself to the electrologist. No new dress or hair style will improve your look so much!

Electrolysis is slow but from the first treatment (which will remove all the hair, some temporarily and some permanently) you will feel better at taking action and in 6 months to a year you will no longer have a problem. Unsightly facial hair problems no more!

I know – I did this over 25 years ago and never looked back….and I expect treatment si much improved these days.

I know there are machines like the One Touch where you can perform electrolysis on yourself. They are an option if funds are very limited but if it’s just a small area on your face I would be tempted to go for professional electrolysis treatment every time. If you end up going for a ONE Touch please practice on an easier part of your body before you set to work on your face! See our review of the One Touch permanent hair remover for more details..

Veronique

Interesting thread on the Hair Tell Forum which starts out by providing a link to an article about hair removal and then moves onto a discussion about the media portrayal of laser hair removal as being so much better than electrolysis even though electrolysis is the only method of hair removal to really work permanently.

HairTell Hair Removal Forum: Feeling plucky? Options abound for hair removal

Be afraid, be very afraid if you try and wax your own bikini line. You will regret it – severely.

Read the amusing (though not for the victim) account on this MySpace blog of do it yourself home bikini line waxing. Not for the faint of heart. (Update : link removed to the account of DIY Brazilian waxing as the blog no longer exists on myspace but if you imagine putting on a lot of wax around your bikini area and then pulling the first lot off, being in agony and not being able to pull off any more then you get the idea! Home waxing is something that takes a bit of getting used to as it is never mind starting with pubic hair removal – one of the trickiest areas )

If you can’t afford to go professional with a Brazilian wax, try another method of hair removal down there. See all the other options here: pubic hair removal and bikini line shaping

Cultural differences are a big thing in hair removal and none more so than with the difference in removing armpit hair for females. In the US and UK it is pretty unusual to see a girl with hairy armpits wearing a sleeveless top or dress, yet in some countries such as Greece and France it’s more normal to see a hairy armpit than not.

There was quite a stir when Julia Roberts sported hair with her long dress on the red carpet – the photos made all the papers but was it really such an ugly sight?

Actually this is a case where half the job is worse than going natural. A few silken hairs are fine and make you look like you just don’t care about such mundane activities as shaving your underarms and have better things to do like saving the planet whereas four-day old stubble looks slovenly.

And in some cultures it would be very much an no-no to show an armpit anyway so they don’t have to worry too much at all….

See the main part of the Simply Hair Removal site for more information on removing underarm hair

I read an article today that said we we seem to be finding more and more things to be ashamed of especially in the U.S. and that this new trend includes hair removal along with our weight, our acne etc.

But  I think it’s not a new trend, by any means, to be ashamed of our perceived physical imperfections.

30 odd years ago I was certainly not too fond of my crop of teenage spots and unwanted hair. Luckily time moves on and  I grew out of the acne and learnt to deal with the hairy bits.

Even Jane Austen’s heroines knew where they stood in the beauty stakes,  and how that might affect their attractiveness to husbands, although they may not have been able to run off and have laser hair removal, a
nose reshaping or breast augmentation and do something about it.

So looks have always been important – maybe it’s just that now we have a whole heap of images of the beautiful people wafting in front of our eyes day after day and the girls never have mustaches nor the boys hairy backs.

The more that we all strive to look good by removing hair and other so-called imperfections, the more it becomes the norm to do so. It’s not just the beautiful people – “everyone” is doing it.

Should we stop trying? No, I don’t think so. It’s good to care about grooming and make the most of yourself. It only becomes damaging where obsession takes over.

Somehow it’s just doesn’t seem worth the money to pay out regularly for waxing or even more for laser hair removal on my legs. I just think about what I could do with that money – and there are a lot more fun ways to spend it.

But I do want smooth legs enough to make the effort and do them myself – and to shell out for an epilator. You can see my cheap solution to removing leg hair on the main part of the Simply Hair Removal site.

What is your spending limit for smooth legs? I would guess it’s not just a factor of income but of how much it matters to you too.

Fuzz-free legs or something to wear on them? Which would you rather have?

Interesting article from Janice Turner of the Times online about the politics and social climate behind body hair removal contrasting the meaning of hair removal in the West and in Islamic culture. My view? Bikini line waxing and/or body hair removal is a personal choice which you make on whatever criteria are important to you – whether that is social custom or religious belief or your own view about what is acceptable or pleasing aesthetically.

When the bikini line turned to a battle line  – Times Online

Tags: bikiniline waxing, body hair removal

Oh how I wish I had a magic hair remover that would just whisk hair away never to be seen again without any mess or pain and we could give up the whole miserable hair removal process. Maybe I’m having a bad day but suddenly every hair removal method look like not quite good enough. I am coping quite well as I have my methods worked out but I wish I didn’t have to bother. And I’m sure many men would rather not shave too. Maybe the answer is that we should forget hair removers and just give ourselves a break and love ourselves just the way we are. But I’d still rather have a hair remover to work it’s magic and make me smooth and hair-free without the bother.

What exactly have I got against every hair removal method today?

1. Pain

Either you remove hair from the surface of the skin without pain and it grows back in a couple of days or you have the pain of removing it from the root. It hurts – no two ways about it. Even if you pay big bucks for a permanent solution you are still getting rid of the hair at the follicle and that means pain. Some devices are on the market like the Epila laser hair remover say they are pain free but pain free generally means that they don’t work!

2. Time

Removing hair eats up your time whether it’s shaving, waiting for depilatory cream to work or getting to appointments at a salon. It takes up hours of your precious time (and even days and weeks over your lifetime). You’ll always find ads for a quick facial hair remover or a fast permanent hair remover but they are never quite as speedy as you’d like i.e. taking no time at all.

3. Mess

If you confine the whole thing to a salon then they get to deal with any mess (and no doubt you pay for that) but if you remove hair at home it’s you who has to clean up any sticky wax residue or any blobs of depilatory cream which fall on the floor. Anyone had to clean Nair hair remover cream from the bedroom carpet like me?

4. Cost

We either pay a big cost for a permanent hair removal method or we pay over and over for waxing treatments (or home wax products), depilatory creams and razors. We buy waxing kits and epilators. We buy facial hair removers, cold wax strips and bleach. Our money could be better spent on more fun stuff if we didn’t care about our unwanted hair.

Never mind, forgive my rant! Despite all that I will still be continuing my hair removal routines and testing with all kinds of hair removers always looking for a better hair remover that will reduce the pain, time, cost and mess. I like my smooth skin! Just a pity we have not found the ideal solution yet!

You may have been thinking about face hair removal for some time wondering what to do about it or maybe you’ve tried a few ways to remove your unwanted facial hair and have found them far from ideal. I know, I tried a few myself many moons ago before I found a permanent way to deal with facial hair.

But I’m not going to tell you about a miracle product that I tried and all the hair was gone like in those scam ads. Believe me there are no such miracle products (although I wish there were). In fact, there is only one proven and FDA approved method to permanently get rid of facial hair. So guess what, I used it!

You see the best method is electrolysis – it’s as old as the hills but it works and it’s still the only way to remove every hair you want rid of permanently.

Of course facial laser hair removal works permanently too to an extent (and may be best if you have large amounts of facial hair to deal with as it is faster and less painful to deal with larger areas) but it does not promise permanent removal of every hair just a permanent reduction in hair growth.

In any case I had relatively few hairs to deal with and with electrolysis they were gone and have not come back decades later. So I can vouch for the performance of the solution.

If you’re considering face hair removal I would go along to a local licensed salon and talk to them about electrolysis for your face and see if it’s a solution for you too. It can take some months of short 15 minute treatments to rid yourself of unwanted hair but the sooner you start the sooner you will be free of the problem.

Of the temporary methods of facial hair removal there’s really nothing ideal due to regrowth problems but you may find a facial depilatory cream is good for a few days and waxing for a few weeks if your skin can stand up to the treatment OK and does not become too sore.

If you only have the odd stray hair on chin or upper lip then plucking with tweezers is just fine although you should not pull the hairs from moles – you should treat these by snipping with scissors close to the skin surface rather than treating them with normal face hair removal methods.