I’ve been shaving my upper arm for about 16 months now and have noticed isolated discoloration spots which are darker than my complextion. Also, there are red spots occuring. I’m assuming its from shaving irritation and because of ingrowns as well. Im hopin to start electrolysis in this area and was wondering if any of the clients of professionals here or ‘patients’ have come across this and if the spots dissappeared over time ater removing the hair/stop shaving. I take it that mine are because im shaving frequently not allowin the skin to heal.
24 y/o male…i really dont know how to quantively measure coarseness, but slightly less coarse than avg eye brow hair…i tried hard to come up with a description, but cant really find something exactly accurate enough.
Yes, you can rest assured that with good hair removal, you will no longer have the irriation and the discoloration will fade. I have had clients who had pitting from ingrown hairs whose faces filled in after the electrolysis eliminated the constant digging and trenching of the offending hairs.
it sounds like you might have slight keratosis pilaris and shaving is causing more of irritation and ingrowns. you can read some past stories of people who have had the hair removed. if you remove that hair permanently, obviously the hairs won’t be irritating the skin anymore, so it should relieve part of the problem. if you have KT, you would still have a bit of redness though in most cases from the experiences I have read here.
THese red bumps were never there until i started shaving. The skin below prior to puttin a razor to it was ‘normal’. Can keratosis pilaris be induced by shaving?
Or, it could be PFB or psuedofolliculitus barbae, basically ingrowns and red bumps caused by hair removal. Exfoliate daily and keep it moisterized to see what happens in a week. There are also products made for this type of irritation.
Keratosis pilaris is frequently referred to as “chicken skin.” The upper arm is a very common area to have this. It is basically a build up of keratin around the follicles. My point is that exfoliation, moistureizing, and anti-keratalitic products will help with this too.
Even though you probably don’t have KP, this thread helped me remember something.
I saw a client last week whom I haven’t seen a one year. She had electrolysis on her arms (upper and lower) with an ambitious schedule. She had KP as well before we started. She came to me for some very scattered cleanup work on her arms and other areas we worked on as well. Hands, forearms and upper arms are very stable. Looks very good compared to the dense amount of hair she had before we started. The skin is very soft in most places. She still has the KP mainly on her upper arms, but she insistes that electrolysis has helped with her KP problem and that it isn’t as rough or noticable. I’m impressed as well since it has been a year since her last treatment.
She had a baby in Oct. 2006 and was really excited that the hair on her abdomen was gone by that time (because we had done electrolysis there as well) and she was not embarrassed for the doctor or the staff to look at and touch her abdomen. Small things make people happy.