Take Off That Hair, Take it All Off!

Ah, ‘tis the season of hair removal. So what will it be? Razor, wax, depilatory cream, tweezing or the expensive route of laser hair removal? Well lets take a look at these methods of de-fuzzing shall we…

Hair removal goes back all the way to the stone age about 100 000 BC. Then the hair was pulled or tweezed from the body with clamshells. The first “razors” made of flint were created about 30 000 BC. so plucking and shaving are nothing new to mankind. Hair removal became all the rage in order to make body painting and tattooing easier. It does sound as though “beauty” was much more painful way back then, although, I’m quite sure modern tweezing hurts just as much now, even with our post stone age type of hair pullers. Around 3000 BC, the first permanent razors were being used in ancient Egypt.

The razor is effective but somewhat crude, using a very sharp object to scrape the hair from ones body can sometimes cause nicks and cuts in the skin, and often has to be repeated on a daily basis in order to maintain that smooth, baby-soft, feeling.

Somewhere between 4000 - 3000 BC, women had begun to concoct depilatory creams out of all kinds of substances including, arsenic and quicklime, (I guess their hubbies didn’t like sharing the razor then too). The ingredients of depilatory creams may have changed somewhat but I highly doubt that the smell has. The effect is quite the same too, just burn that hair off using chemicals.

Depilatory creams are not effective for everybody, and if one is not careful with the timing or has sensitive skin, may remove skin as well as hair…I don’t feel it is worth the time and effort one has to put into it, spread the cream, sit for up to 10 minutes (with that smell), wipe off, and do again two days later - if you are lucky…sometimes it is the next day if you have quick growing hair.

Sometime around the 1960’s somebody thought it would be a good idea to put heated wax on strips of cloth, press it to the body part with the unwanted hair and rip the hair off of the body from it’s roots. Yeow! I guess that decade wasn’t as gentle as we would like to believe - maybe it was a way for the “establishment” to get back at the hippies or something.

Waxing definitely has it’s pros and cons, it takes about four weeks for the hair to grow back and usually comes in a bit finer than before, however, it hurts! The hair needs to be about a ¼ inch before the wax can really grab it and it usually doesn’t take all of it, tweezing the “stragglers” is a necessary evil afterwards. Some women swear by it some swear about it - I’m one of the latter.

Now a days, we have technological hair warfare, electrolysis and laser hair removal which is supposed to shock or burn the hair at its roots permanently preventing re-growth. These methods are expensive, usually take up a lot of time (sometimes it needs to be done more than once in an area), and are painful often burning the skin. Even though I haven’t tried it, I can’t see it being worth the trouble.

With all of these methods of hair removal at our fingertips, all that needs to be done is deciding which one is right for you…if any. Depending on the fashion of the day, and hygienic habits, hair removal is an option that has in some ways come a long way from the stone age - but in other ways stayed much the same.

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