Dr. Neal Schultz: Hello I'm Dr. Neal Schultz and welcome to DermTV.
When we discuss techniques, we getting rid of unwanted hair whether its body hair or facial hair. Long before we had lasers, waxing was and still is a very popular technique or be it a temporary technique of hair removal, but its still is very popular for several reasons, its easy, its fast and its relatively inexpensive. The real problem that woman have though from waxing is that sometimes waxing causes ingrown hairs. Usually it happens in either the bikini area or the upper thigh and that's probably because of the coarseness, or thickness of the hair is there.
When you get ingrowns, you get this unsightly red, painful bumps or pimples. The real problem though is that once your hair is ingrown, it's always ingrown. That means your ingrown after a while pops out, the bump goes away but three months later when that hair starts to grow again its going to be ingrown again, and that's even if you stop waxing. Let me show you what's happening.
We are going to build your own little human hair follicle today. So this is actually the bulb or the hair follicle where the hair grows from and attached to this going up to the skin is a tube and this tube helps get the hair up to the surface. In side this tube, there is actually a lining and that lining is very, very important at guiding the hair up to the surface of the skin. Here of course is our requisite hair and that hair has to come out through a hole in the skin, so that the hair has a way of actually exiting the body. When you wax you pull the hair out very rapidly and that very rapid pulling actually disrupts this very important lining.
If lining is gone than the next time that hair wakes up and has to grow again it doesn't have its path. So get out through the skin. So if we rebuild our little model, the next time this hair starts to grow, it doesn't have that lining to guide it, it doesn't have the path and look what happens, it's no longer going towards the hole. It comes up against the inside of the skin and this is what cause your ingrown, its got no way to get out.
Now this doesn't happen every time women wax. But if does happen to you and you're getting these ingrowns from waxing, then the solution is laser hair removal, because the laser will kill that root. So it can no longer produce a hair and have that misguided hair coming up, and by the way once you've done laser hair removal to control ingrowns from waxing you'll probably decide the laser hair removal is a superior way to go to control all of your unwanted hair.
Please join me again at dermtv.com. If you have a question please send it to me by visiting dermtv.com/question. I'm Dr. Neal Schultz and thank you for watching today.
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