As bikini season comes on I get more and more questions about ingrown hair and what to do about them, but the real question people should be asking is what they can do to prevent them.
Regardless of how you remove your hair you can get ingrown hairs. There are three reasons people get ingrown hairs. Most ingrown hairs occur when the hair isn’t removed from the root properly and is shaved off or broken off at the top of the skin.
Notice how the tip is thinner and pointed in the hair diagram to the left? It’s shaped like this so that it can penetrate the skin. When hair is shaved or broken (breaking often happens with improper tweezing and waxing) off at the surface of the skin the hair no longer has a tappered top. Because it’s blunt and thick it has trouble getting through the skin. This creates dysfunctional hair that can’t escape the skin’s surface.
You can also get ingrows from curly hair that grows back into the skin. This is often seen with pubic hair and men’s beards. As the hair gets longer it is either rubbed into the skin by clothing, or curls and pushes back into the skin. This irritates the skin and creates an ingrown hair.
Finally there is hair type. Thin or fine hair is weak and will have more trouble getting through the skin. This is why a long time waxer may suddenly start getting ingrown hairs when they never did before. When you wax the hair follicle is damaged and the hair gets weak and thin. This means the hair is dying (hurray!) but it can also create ingrown hairs.
Reducing ingrown hairs is really very simple. You need to exfoliate and use an ingrown hair product every day. My regiment for clients with ingrowns is Bioelements Cactus Cloth and Hovan’s In-Grow Gold. Many people tell me they are already scrubbing the area, but unless you are using something as hard as a Cactus Cloth on a daily basis you aren’t exfoliating hard enough or often enough. Using an anti-ingrow product like In-Grow Gold every day is essential too. The formulation of this product is designed to help prevent in-grown hairs AND to heal ones you may already have.
If you already have in-grown hairs you need to scrub daily and use your anti-ingrown product 2X a day until they go away. I know many people want to remove the hairs by, as I call it, performing surgery, but give this routine a week before you start digging into yourself. If you MUST perform surgery, please use clean tools – YOUR NAILS ARE NOT TOOLS – like a tweezer and a lancet. Release the hair from the skin and don’t pull it out unless you are sure you can get it by the root. If you break it off you are going to make the problem worse. If the area is red or pussy put a product like Neosporin on it to keep the infection down.
I hope that helps everyone! No one hates ingrown hair more than me, because I have suffered them too.