HairFacts | Hair Removal Information
For consumers, by consumers
An interesting article from Ghana that focuses on dealing with the harsh summer sun and with temporary hair removal:
Body Beautiful: Get smooth, fuzz-free skin
Hair removal is no walk in the park; depending on how you do it, it can be downright painful and no matter what it eventually grows back. For getting into summer clothes, the three most common hair removal techniques are shaving, waxing and using depilatory creams.
Full article (modernghana.com)
Sam Lemonick has a great piece in Chemical & Engineering News on hair removal, with a focus on depilatory creams:
Creams are a popular option for at-home removal. To understand how these work, you first have to understand hair. Hair is made of fibrous proteins called keratin, twisted like yarn or rope into long bundles. Keratin strands are cross-linked by covalent disulfide bonds and weaker hydrogen bonds. These are depilatory creamsâ targets.
The active ingredients in brands Veet and Nair are salts of thioglycolic acid like potassium thioglycolate or calcium thioglycolate in combination with bases such as calcium, sodium, or potassium hydroxide. The bases serve two purposes. They cause the hair to swell, opening its keratin fibers to allow thioglycolate to penetrate. The bases also remove the proton on thioglycolateâs thiol group. Once thioglycolateâs proton leaves, its sulfur atom is free to attack the hair proteinâs disulfide bonds. Break enough of those, and the hair degrades completely and can simply be wiped away.
Because of this mechanism of action, chemical hair removers are remarkably selective, studies have shown. Researchers tested Nair on thin, thick, and medium hair, and on cotton, rayon, and polyester fibers. All three strands of hair broke within 10 minutes, but the remover had no effect on the other fibers, none of which contain disulfide bonds.
Other experiments have shown that cream hair removers should have a pH between about 12.0 and 12.5 to make sure the products work quickly but arenât so caustic that they burn the skin, which has a pH of 4.5â5.5. Dermatologist Meghan Feely says cream hair removers can cause chemical burns for some people. They should be used according to their directions to minimize risk.
Because these chemicals are so effective, the book is basically closed on finding new depilatory agents, says Heike Hanau, a marketing manager for Merck & Co., which used to supply calcium thioglycolate for hair removers. But she says chemists are still working to improve depilatoriesâ smell. One by-product of thioglycolateâs reaction with disulfide bonds is hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs.
Learn more about >Â cream depilatories
Laura Mazza from Facebook’s Mum on the Run page shares her profanity-laced tale of woe, where she thought she’d do a little pubic hair removal prior to her C-section.
As my due date edges closer, I have thought about removing my own body hair so that I donât get shaved down by a nurse in the act of a cesarean and die of embarrassment because she needs a whipper snipper to cut through the Sherwood Forest.
Now, I am not some Italian/Argentinian who was blesssd with good genes, tanned skin… no I was born as white as a cue tip with dark thick hair like Bigfoot. Motherf****n Bigfoot gus.
Anyway, Iâve been thinking about getting waxed but I donât want to deal with the pain. So someone suggested hair removal cream. A cream that effortlessly removes body hair without pain and effort, an alternative to shaving. Lasts a bit longer apparently.
