Hair Removal Methods ★ Man Thing

FEELING hairy? You're not alone. Thankfully, you have several ways to deal with unwanted body, facial, and pubic hair.

Clippering

Clippering, also called trimming, is the easiest, fastest and least traumatic way to get rid of unwanted body hair.

Clippering can be done in the privacy of your own home, and doesn't require any particular skills.

It involves using a set of electric clippers, also referred to as hair trimmers.

The results don't last very long and the result won't be perfectly smooth, but clippering does hold its own special place in the list of hair removal methods, most notably in terms of convenience.

Shaving

Next is shaving. Again, it's an easy option with the added advantage that you will get a smooth result at least for the short term.

The results of shaving don't last terribly long, because you are only removing the hair at the surface of the skin.

Stubble quickly reappears and shaving becomes a daily affair, with cuts, bumps, itching, and shaving rash soon becoming a new fact of life.

Depilatory Creams & Sprays

As for depilatory creams, use them with caution. Depilatory creams (yes, sprays are the same thing in different packaging) have come under intense scrutiny during recent years.

Keratin, the substance which is targeted and dissolved by depilatory creams, is a vital substance in both hair and skin, and unfortunately the keratin in your skin can be damaged as well.

You also run the risk of absorbing chemicals into your blood, plus other more common symptoms such as pimples, folliculitis, cracking, crepey skin, and thickening of the epidermis.

For the same short term result, you're better off shaving.

Waxing

By a very big margin, the most common form of commercial hair removal is waxing. It removes the hair shaft and root, but unlike electrolysis, IPL and laser, waxing leaves the hair bulb intact.

New hair will usually regrow in 4-6 weeks but comes back finer after each treatment.

Sugaring

Bluntly, sugaring is pretentious twaddle. Back in the 2010s, someone decided to reinvent the wheel by bringing this old hair removal treatment from Ancient Persia to the modern day.

Sugaring is popular with people who feel the need to be different and tell all their friends about it, and are happy to pay extra for the privilege of a treatment that takes twice as long.

Electrolysis

Electrolysis is an old but effective way of removing hair for the long term, as it destroys the bulb of each hair one at a time. The down side is that electrolysis is costly, quite painful, takes a very long time to perform, and requires many treatments.

All those negatives aside, electrolysis is regarded by most government and industry bodies as the only 100% permanent method of hair removal.

For that reason, only electrolysis can be advertised as permanent hair removal, where IPL and laser have to use the somewhat watered down term 'permanent hair reduction'.

Unfortunately, very few new therapists receive training in electrolysis as there are many big hurdles (in Australia at least) to become qualified nowadays. Due to those difficulties, it seems to be a dying art form and finding a reputable therapist can be difficult.

Laser

Several types of lasers are used for hair removal. Yag and Alexandrite are common examples. They differentiate from one another by frequency, with each type generally claiming to be the best and/or newest.

Laser achieves a lesser long-term result than electrolysis, however it can treat larger areas more quickly.

In the 2020s, laser is mainly found at franchised laser chains that you generally find at shopping centres. Treatments are usually cheap but somewhat painful without a numbing cream.

Results aren't necessarily consistent, which is reflected in most laser chains offering blocks of ten treatments.

Low efficacy is partly due to the high staff turnover rate at discount laser clinics. Trainee placements are quite common in order for students - who often pay for the privilege of working - to complete their mandatory clinic hours in order to become qualified.

It's unfortunately the nature of the beast in many states of Australia. This low perception of the industry is one of the reasons I won't use laser equipment in my clinics any more.

IPL

IPL, or Intense Pulsed Light, works in a similar manner to laser, i.e., a bright flash of light targets melanin in the hair with a pulse of heat energy.

The principal difference is that where laser operates on a pre-set wavelength, IPL is variable. It can operate on many frequencies between 430 and 1200 nM.

Filters can also be applied to enable the light to pass more effectively through different shades of skin.

With all the above said, many different types of IPL are on the market. These range from the hand-held IPL you can buy from razor and shaver shops, to high end medical grade equipment like the units we use at Man Thing.

IPL results are like anything else. You get what you pay for. I've used medical-grade IPL at all my clinics for over 20 years. It's safe and effective.

Future Tech

Future Tech - Film Wax

I was sceptical about film wax at first. No wax wholesaler could explain to me exactly how it differed from hard wax, except to claim that it pulled out very short hairs while not sticking to the skin.

How? Why? ... Crickets.

Anyway, after a year or two of it being pushed heavily on the market but with little uptake by waxing studios, I trialled some.

As it turns out, yes, it is better than hard wax for pulling out very short hairs. It's a bit finicky, and I wouldn't use it unless you've mastered hard wax, but yes, it does live up to its claims.

Future Tech - Laser and IPL

Just as the various laser manufacturers all claim to be better than each other, the same can be said of IPL. There is always some new 'wonder variation' being offered to clinics, and really, it's nonsense.

SHR is probably the worst of these offerings in recent years; a fast-flashing, low joule, high-shot-count, high-cost IPL variant, designed to pump clients through quickly but with poor results.

This awful tech helped lead to the financial collapse of my main competitor in Brisbane several years ago. So basically, do your research when shopping about for permanent hair reduction.

The reality is I have seen no major improvements to laser or IPL technology *released to the market* in the last 15 years.

I emphasised that point because both technologies have developed as far as machine manufacturers want them to develop.

With both laser and IPL enjoying around 50% market share each, there is zero commercial value in manufacturers releasing more effective tech, as they will only sell less consumables.

Maybe one day we will finally see a variation of IPL or laser that effectively removes blonde, red, and grey hairs. With existing technology, 75% of the population won't achieve results from IPL or laser due to their hair colour.

Back in the mid-2000s, a brand called ELOS was the most promising variant technology, combining IPL with RF (radio frequency), but it proved ineffective and fizzled out to nothing.

So, that's it, for now at least.

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