Unwanted facial hair affects both men and women and is much more common than you may think.
This common problem has many solutions, depending on the colour and kind of hair you want to remove.
Here is our quick guide to the options you have.
If you have light, or small areas of unwanted facial hair, you can remove it at home fairly easily. Bleaching, waxing, trimming, plucking and shaving are the most popular home-methods. If your unwanted hair is dark or thick, you may need to think about professional hair removal, such as electrolysis.
Bleaching can be an easy and effective way to deal with unwanted facial hair. You must be aware though that bleaching is only truly effective with thin hair that grows slowly. Thick hair will catch enough light to make the bleach job obvious. If your facial hair grows quickly, you’ll always be battling to get the new growth bleached each day.
Waxing, trimming, plucking and shaving are temporarily effective for almost any colour or area of unwanted facial hair. However, all of these methods risk promoting the hair growth, making it thicker and darker over time. If the unwanted hair is located on a mole, trimming is really your only safe alternative for removal.
Electrolysis is effective in helping stop hair growth, but can be tedious. Electrolysis sends electric pulses to each hair you want removed, damaging the root and surrounding area so the hair will stop growing. It can often take many treatments for the method to work and you do have to treat each hair individually. Electrolysis can be very painful and if done incorrectly and it can result in a mass of skin and hair related problems.
Laser facial hair removal is the latest solution when it comes to hair removal techniques. It covers a much larger area than electrolysis and is much effective than home methods. The laser heats the dark pigment in the hair and destroys the follicle. The drawback to this is people with light hair or dark skin cannot use laser hair removal. There are also a mass of potential problems if the method is done improperly.
If you have a large area of unwanted hair, or you are very dark haired then do seek advice from a professional on your best method for long term removal.
