Unless you’re planning on undergoing a full-body laser hair removal treatment, ingrown hairs are going to be a fact of life.
An ingrown hair is a hair that has not grown to the surface of the skin but curls back into the follicle and grows under the skin.
This can happen when a thick layer of dead skin remains on the surface of the body, leaving the hair nowhere to go but back down. The result of this is unseemly red bumps, or what everyone refers to as “razor bumps”. As annoying as they are, they’re also preventable and easy to get rid of once you have them.
Here are some things you can do to prevent and remove them altogether:
Invest in a good exfoliating pad. Any beautician will tell you that the only way to prevent ingrown hair in the long run is to exfoliate your skin. Since the main cause of ingrown hair is a thick layer of dead skin, exfoliation is the ideal solution.
Make sure you’re using a fresh blade when you shave. When you use a dull blade, not only are you risking not removing all of the hair, but you’re also opening yourself up to the possibility of serious skin irritation and cutting yourself. You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run if you switch out your blade once a week or more, depending on how often you shave.
Tweeze before shaving. This one is annoying but sometimes you have to bite the bullet. You can check for ingrown hairs before shaving and making sure that your tweezers are very clean, lift out any ingrown hairs you have. Only do this with the nagging, persistent ones, though. Don’t irritate your skin any more than is absolutely necessary.
Use an epilator instead of a razor. Epilators do the work of 50 tweezers at once, pulling the hair out from the root rather than cutting it short like shaving does, so it makes sense that the hair would grow in naturally from the root again.
Think about it; you don’t really ever get any ingrown hairs on your eyebrows when you tweeze them, right? Some epilators can be really loud, and the noise isn’t exactly a friendly one, but once you get past that, they’re totally worth it.
