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The ethics of hair removal

Ethicist Heather Widdows wrote an interesting piece for TIME magazine about the ethics of hair removal:

Visible body hair is rarely seen. It is so rare that underarm hair on a celebrity becomes a news story. For the rest of us, showing it in public — even at the beach, when wearing very little — is almost a political statement in itself. Increasingly, women remove all visible body hair. Including pubic hair. Men too have been getting in on the act, hence the long-rising popularity of the “back, sack and crack” waxing technique. The hairy chests and Playboy bushes of the 1970s are gone. Quite simply, body hair is no longer a feature of the ideal body.

Read the rest

Check out Widdows’ book Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal for more on this topic:

 

Profile: Daventry clinic adds Apilus electrolysis

Steve Mills of Daventry Today profiles Maninder Bhandal, owner of The Haven in Sheaf Street, Daventry, who has added an Apilus electrology machine to her salon:

The Haven has had the Apilus technology since October and Mrs Bhandal said it had gone down well with her customers.

She explained: “It has been absolutely wonderful. Previously, some customers could only cope with five minutes of electrolysis, but using this new method, people feel they can have their hair removed.

Full article (daventrytoday.co.uk)

website: http://www.epilsoft.co.uk/apilus_technology.html

Beauty and The Beach: Your Guide To Summer Beauty

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)

“Kitty” from Kitty’s Consumer Beware has died

My hairtell.com hair removal forum was founded in response to a now-defunct forum called Kitty’s Consumer Beware. The site owner, Cathey Annette Baker, was a tenacious defender of “no-needle electrolysis” in the days when the internet was the Wild West in terms of advertising. She also allied herself with a number of hair removal practitioners who saw this forum as a threat, because consumers weren’t censored and we discussed pros AND cons of various forms of hair removal.

A reader alerted me to an email they received regarding the death of “Kitty,” and I confirmed it with an announcement in the Dallas Morning News:

http://www.legacy.com/dallasmorningnews/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonID=123842906
Cathey Annette Baker
Baker, Cathey Annette Age 60, of Garland, passed away February 5, 2009. Restland Funeral Home 972-238-7111.
Published in the Dallas Morning News on 2/8/2009

The funeral home had a page on her:

http://www.restlandfuneralhome.com/obituaries/tribute.html?urlName=Cathey-Annette-Baker-Garland-TX-2009&urlID=85226096

* BORN: January 3, 1949
* DIED: February 5, 2009
* LOCATION: Garland, TX

She was preceded in death by her parents, Glenn and Ouita Baker. She is survived by brother, Reginald Baker and wife Tanya; sister, Schari Baker Bibb and husband Ryan; nephews, Jared and Jordon Baker; nieces, Jessica Bibb Girard and husband Adam, and Megan Bibb; nephew Schuyler Bibb; greatniece Madison Grace bibb; and numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins.

The super-expensive no-needle devices are almost completely obsolete at this point. Both major manufacturers, Guaranty Hair Removal and Rejuvenu, are out of business. Rejuvenu founder Lee Cole died in October 2004.

These devices were especially problematic, because they sold for thousands of dollars and were advertised as home businesses. That meant that an unwitting practitioner would rip off their friends and neighbors before determining the device did not work as claimed, thereby ruining their reputation and business. The only people who made money were the people running the Multi-level marketing plans to sell the devices.

It’s a shame that “Kitty” spent such a large portion of her life fighting to promote questionable products and services. Imagine if that energy had been put to more productive use, even just spending more time with friends and family. Perhaps there’s a lesson in that for each of us.

New luxury home waxing kit set to debut in fall 2018

Waksē is a new stripless home waxing product made of small beads. Via CEW Beauty Insider:

Wakse is aiming to bring a luxurious, sensorial experience to at-home waxing, by way of visually appealing formulas and fragrances that look to transform hair removal into a fun, and even Instagrammable, moment.

Read the rest (CEW members only)

Their website is waxse.com

New DVD: The Complete Guide to Laser Hair Removal

Aesthetic VideoSource’s new instructional DVD, The Complete Guide to Laser Hair Removal, walks doctors and medical spa personnel through the science and application of this increasingly popular cosmetic option. Featuring two physicians – Christine Whitelaw, M.D., and Mark B. Taylor, M.D.

 The Complete Guide to Laser Hair Removal [amazon.com]

Home-use hair removal devices heat up holidays

by Andrea James

 The most dynamic trend for the beauty industry in 2008 has been the emergence of new at-home or do-it-yourself (DIY) tools for hair removal.

While the Palomar/Gillette device, the first one cleared by FDA, is still unavailable, two nimble newcomers are stealing the thunder this holiday season.

arrow Silk’n Flash&Go (power level is about 3-5 Joules/cm2)

arrow TRIA Beauty (power level is about 7-22 Joules/cm2)

 

TRIA beauty has been making a big publicity push. Neither device is cheap, and will set you back $700 to over $900. Still that is cheaper than a course of professional laser treatments.

Note that effectiveness of the lower-power home devices won’t match the pro versions, and there are a ton of products to avoid. Make sure the device you buy is cleared by FDA for at least some evidence of safety and effectiveness. And don’t buy anything on eBay till you read my list of scam products sold primarily on eBay.

 Full article [marketwatch.com]

More information:

 Home laser hair removal: what works, what doesn’t

What are hair removers, and how do they get rid of unwanted fuzz?

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 creams’ 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 thioglycolate’s thiol group. Once thioglycolate’s proton leaves, its sulfur atom is free to attack the hair protein’s 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 aren’t so caustic that they burn the skin, which has a pH of 4.5–5.5. 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 depilatories’ smell. One by-product of thioglycolate’s reaction with disulfide bonds is hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs.

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Learn more about > cream depilatories

Hilarious NSFW tale of a pregnant mom’s hair removal nightmare

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 don’t 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, I’ve been thinking about getting waxed but I don’t 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.

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Read the CafeMom summary

Woman with PCOS shaves face to reduce cystic acne

Via iDiva:

I had first heard that hair-removal from the face can help prevent breakouts from a friend with cystic acne due to PCOD, who heard it from her dermatologist. Now, while I don’t have very thick hair growth, I do have a lot of hair on my face, pretty much right up to my eyeballs. This means that thick makeup and skin products, bacteria, and other oily or dirty things had plenty of fur to latch onto and create a mess. The oil would cling to the hair, the hair follicles would attract germs, and the hair would spread those everywhere, making me break out. I was intrigued by the idea of shaving primarily because I truly was sick of constantly being covered in pimples.

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