Homemade Beauty Recipes

ingrown hair home remedies

ingrown hair home remedies - An in-growing hair can be so painful - and also red and ugly. The bikini line is one of the most common places that hairs will grow inwards especially after waxing and shaving. You have spent all year dieting to get into your bikini and a few days before going on holiday you made a special trip to the beauty salon to have your bikini line waxed. Now you are lying on a wonderfully warm Caribbean beach relaxing with your pina calada and suddenly you notice - staring right back at you - an ugly red boil - an in-growing hair. Life can be so unfair.

How does it happen ?

normal hair shaft

Waxing will remove the hairs straight from the root, leaving the hair shaft empty for a while until a new fresh hair grows. When that hair grows sometimes it won’t grow straight and it meets the skin at the top of the pore instead of growing out through the open pore. It will carry on growing along the skin and can then become infected.

Another reason can be that the skin grows over the top of the pore, therefore not allowing the hair to grow through and out into the light. The hair continues to grow and has nowhere but into the skin to grow.

It's not just waxing that can cause in-growing hairs : it's shaving as well. The shaver skims over the surface of the skin cutting the hair : this can leave a very sharp pointed hair behind and that sharp hair now has the ability to cut right into the skin where it will happily continue to grow.

How can we prevent this from happening ?

After waxing, the pores are left wide open and are easily infected. Use an antiseptic cream such as tea tree lotion or alternatively a cream that you would use as a first aid for cuts. Continue to apply this lotion twice daily for 48 hours giving the pores time to close. Five days after waxing you should begin to exfoliate every second day and until the hairs are visibly growing again. This will prevent any build up of dead skin, therefore will keep the opening to the pores free, allowing the hair to grow normally.

Prevent in-growing hairs when shaving

By shaving in the same direction as the hair. You will not disturb the direction of the growth of the hair by doing this.