Ingrown hair

Hair Removal Methods Do-It-Yourself Electrolysis
#1

What does one call a hair that never reaches the surface, but curls up inside the follicle, and causes a white, creamy (but not pus, exactly) substance ot form? And how does one treat such?

I found one on the side of my clients face today, it was a dark spot on otherwise white skin. It had a small crusty “cap” over the follicle, and when I removed it, the white stuff was able to be squeezed out. Once I removed quite a bit of it (and is it ever smelly!), I was able to see a LARGE hole, and a hair inside. I carefully worked on it, and pulled out a curly hair that was about an inch long.

I wasn’t able to epilate the hair, as the large hole left behind by the “pus” (I guess this was an infected follicle, though there was no surface indication) prevented me from seeing inside and being able to get to the bulb. But the hair was barely hanging on, it came out easily enough.

The main question is how to prevent this from happening in the future, and hopefully catching it before it happens again, and permanently removing the hair?

#2

Things like this happen here and there and this is a natural occurrence. If the hair was lifted out by an electrolgist and was still attached to the tissue that grows the hair, then the electrologist could have treated the hair. If all conditions were right and the hair was treated properly, then it won’t return- EVER - then there would be nothing in the follicle to trap - then there would be no infection. “Killing” the hair disrupts the circle of ingrown hairs.

#3

Well, I tried, but the hole the hair was in was HUGE (the color-ring of a two-piece needle would almost fit inside), but I could not get an insertion into the bulb-area of the hair, because I could not see inside the hole to see where the hair terminated. And the slightest pull with tweezers released the hair, so I think it was barely in at all.

After doing some reading, it wasn’t ingrown, rather embedded(there was no hair in the epidermis at all, I just saw a dark spot under the skin where she pointed it out… this has happened to her before, it seems). I’ll keep an eye on the area, and try to get it next time it comes around.

#4

In the case you described, simply removing the hair is all you could have done. An over zealous practitioner would use blend to fill the hole with lye/cuastic soda, and hope for the best, but what the body needs in this case is time to heal once the immune system antagonizer (the detatched hair) has been removed.

Frequently you will have a hair, that for what ever reason, dies beneath the surface of the skin and just doesn’t come out without the immune system going into action. The white stuff builds up to push the object up and out of the body, but that process can take weeks, and the eruption can be painful. Careful removal, with the least skin distress, and drainage of the eruption (and a dap of teat tree oil after) would bring that area of skin back to normal in the shortest time possible.

Sometimes these things develope due to spillover treatment from a nearby hair treated with electrolysis damaging the other follicle, or killing the hair prior to it making its birth above the skin’s surface. Other times, it is just a hair that has gone ingrown and grew its whole life without ever breaking the surface of the skin.

I have clients who are prone to hairs growing as long as 3 to 6 inches either like a river line on a map, or in swirls underneath their skin.

#5

I lifted a 4" bikini line hair out last week. I had to use a sterile lancet to coax it up and out. It didn’t take much effort. There was no pus or white stuff. It looked a little snakey under the skin and could not have been seen without magnification. No bump, just a little discoloration. I was amazed to see that it was so long and it was still attached with a good bulb! I used a good dose of blend on this particular hair and then it was back to PicoFlash thermolysis.