Hey people
I need some info on what epilator is the best my needs.
Ive got long thick dark hair pretty much all over chest stomach and arms. my upper back is thinner but still has dark hair.
Right now ive got a Braun Silk-epil easystart
Ive also seen other Braun ones and Emjoi Gently Gold Caress and Emjoi Ultima (i think)
I recently bought a Braun Silk-Epil 5270. It contains 40 tweezers on a single rotating barrel/drum.
It comes with two epilating heads, one with rotating rollers that is suppose to help for first timers, and an advanced head that exposes a bit more of the epilator drum.
Me, I don’t use any head and just use the bare drum against my skin. Does it catch on my skin, sometimes, yeah, but only if I let it slip and roll backward.
I’m a guy, BTW, and the reason why I use an epilator is because I’m a spinal injury patient, and thus my skin below my injury doesn’t prespire and therefore is very dry, which gets very flakey especially on my shins. This dryness also causes frequent pimple break-outs. Why, I’m not sure. It just does. Before I started shaving my body hair, and now epilating it, my zit break-outs were getting out of hand. I’d get’em on my legs, stomach/chest, and arms. And I discovered that by getting rid of the body hair over them, they’d heal up better, which BTW is why bicyclists shave their legs so that any scrapes they get (by falling) will heal up faster.
Anyway, I used to shave with Mach 3 razors, but it was too frequent and I’d get regrowth all over my body within 36 hours or less. So I started looking for alternate methods of hair removal and eventually bought one of those cylindrical rotary shavers. It worked alright, but wasn’t very good for an all body shave, and the recharge didn’t last very long.
So I started looking into Epilators and found that this new Braun 5270 was getting great reviews on Amazon and decided to buy one for about $70 shipped.
Well, I love it. I use it everywhere, and I do mean everywhere. Butt crack (don’t ask) and all.
The trick is that you have to be conscious of hair growth cycles. The first time you use it, it may take a week or so for you to get all the hairs, as I was getting new stubble everyday. Relax, that’s not regrowth, that’s new hairs on different growth cycles.
I’ve only had the unit for a month now, and for the most part, it appears I can go for about 2-3 weeks without having to epilate the same hair. Notice I said, the same hair. Because I found that you’ll probably be using the unit fequently to do touch-ups as you’ll constantly get new hair growth from different growth cycles.
But for the most part, my body remains pretty much hair free.
How do you do the epilation? Go AGAINST the grain. I don’t understand this go WITH the grain instruction. That’s not what the instructions say. Like for the lower leg it says to start at the ankles. And if that isn’t against the grain, I don’t what is.
The trick is that hair grows in all directions on certain parts of the body, so you’ll have to readjust your angles depending on where you are.
With regards to ingrown hairs, here’s what I discovered. After you have gotten yourself hair-free and smooth. Do a regular shave. This will scrape off the layer of dead skin over your follicles so that the regrowth will less likely get stuck under the skin. However, I found out that the chest is still a bad place for ingrowns. Here again, just shave as they come back in and then a day later you can epilate the hairs as they come back in.
As for the required length? The 5270 says it needs .5 mm. I’d say that’s pretty true in most cases, because it gets hairs that I can’t even see.
