The black dot isn’t the actual hair. If i scrape at it a little i can squeeze it out, but this produces bad red bumps. The are more like clogged pores, i’m guessing from my pores actually enlarging from plucking (which is very obvious if compared to my upper leg which I do not pluck).
Upper legs usually have smaller pores regardless. I doubt you’re doing anything to make it worse. But of course, stopping everything would help you get your smoothness back.
Well I am back. My last post was in July I think. I am still plucking. I really did a number a few days ago. I gauged at my legs. I know this is OCD, and I am considering seeing a doctor for it, but I am soooo embarassed. I feel so ashamed. Like I said I have been doing this since I was 18, now I’m 47. I too used to have beautiful skin on my legs. They are so scarred and ugly, I will never be able to wear shorts or dresses again.
If you have this problem, don’t wait for decades like I have.
My fear is that I’ll break a leg or something that requires medical attention where doctors and or relatives will have to see my legs. This scares me so much, i’d die of embarrassment.
Right now, I am trying to work on my OCD with diet and supplements taking lots of Vit. C
WOrking on trying shave my legs regularly and when the urge comes to pluck, usually stress makes me want to, laying down and trying to take deep breathes and meditate!
Wish me luck
I for one wish you luck. Keep optimistic that you will overcome your obsession. Just like a stutterer, this will always be with you, but you can develop strategies that can minimize the stress that leads you to our tweezers. Thanks for checking back, LO.
Hi “Leslie Ok” (are you from Oklahoma?)
I hope you are also increasing your EFA’s (Essential Fatty Acids) and taking Melatonin and Tryptophan at night. Julia Ross’ The Diet Cure has a great section on brain chemistry problems and discusses the links to this and OCD. Earlier in this monumental thread/string/rope we talked about some of the brain chemistry nutrients that one can use to get back on balance.
Please find out all you can about brain chemistry regulation and nutrients, use the information, and post back here to let us know your progress. I know some people have been helped by this information, but they seem to forget to come back her and say how it worked out for them. Maybe you will be the first to give an exit interview.
James,
I have read The Diet Cure along with the Mood Cure.
I just today bought a lot of vitamins. Multi, D, Calcium and Mag., C,
I also am going to change my diet by eating a lot of fish and the foods Julia talks about.
I am OCD and it interfers with so much of my life, I have kinda accepted that is how I am. Some of the things I keep to myself, but my husband knows most of it.
I am hopeful, So far 2 days no plucking! LOL I used to think just the plucking was okay, but now I realise I have to stop all of it. I can laugh at myself, I know I am strange, but I am hopeful! I’ll keep checking back!
Bless you “Leslie OK”
I have hope that you stick with it and get to enjoy the benefits. Do keep us informed.
You will be amazed at the changes restoring your brain chemistry will have. Thinking clearly again will be such a godsend.
Wow-- it’s such a relief to come across so many people who share my obsession! I’m twenty years old and have suffered from trich for about three years. I pull hair from my legs, face, head, and… well, just about anywhere, really. I notice that I pull more often when I’m stressed, but when I’m bored at home (or concentrating on something like a book) I’ll often start to pull and find it nearly impossible to make myself stop.
I’ve recently started visiting a psychologist and feel I am making some progress towards quitting. I would strongly recommend cognitive behavioral therapy to all of you. It can be embarrassing to have to describe your pulling in detail to a stranger… I know I wasn’t 100% truthful on my first visit. But talking to a professional is vital if you want to learn to understand your behavior-- after all, acknowledgement and understanding have to come first if you want to quit. My psychologist explained that pulling is caused by an obsessive thought-feeling-action loop in your brain… for me, pulling is a means of trying to cure an imagined sensation somewhere on my body (it can feel like an itch sometimes) or a sense of panic when I see a conspicuous hair. One of the best things to do is to wear a hat, tights, gloves, or anything that provides a physical barrier and interrupts the loop. If you keep breaking the cycle, your urges will decrease over time and may eventually stop completely.
It’s really hard to deal with though… my hair is thinner than it used to be, and I have those ugly brownish-purplish dots on my legs that other people here have mentioned. I also got a bad case of warts from picking at my legs and I’m still treating those. Ugh… my legs just look sooo disgusting right now. And I hate that my friends can go out in short skirts and do their hair up all nicely while I’m stuck in stockings and confined to hairstyles that hide my damage.
Are there any effective products out there for treating those leg scars? And do they fade eventually? I feel like exfoliation only makes my skin more irritated, but maybe that’s just because my legs haven’t fully healed yet.
I am shocked to find out that there are so many other people struggling with the same problem. I started plucking between age 12-13, and I am now 33, so about 20 years of my life I’ve been doing this to myself. My legs are horribly scarred as a consequence. I’ve got everything from deep purple scars to white keloids. There is not one square inch that looks like normal skin.
I stopped wearing shorts when I was 14 because a boy asked if I had leprosy or something. I think I can count on both hands the amount of times I’ve gone in public with my legs bare since then.
I’ve always told myself that my skin doesn’t heal normally because of a deficiency of a vitamin or mineral. I always justified the plucking behavior because I’d be shaving it anyway, so what did it matter? But it seems that the truth is that something is very wrong and what I’m doing is in no way healthy.
Like so many of you I also get a feeling of release from pulling the hairs out. And there are times where I really can’t make myself stop doing it. It’ll be 3 a.m. and I’ll have to be up by 8 and I just keep going. I have found that periods of stress make it much worse.
I have recently started taking Inositol because a friend was using it to control his OCD behaviors. When I take it I feel more smooth on the inside, more relaxed. I’ve found that while I still want to pull hairs it’s less of a compulsion. I haven’t been taking it regularly, but after this I’m going to make a more serious effort. It’s time for this to stop.
I’ve also thought about getting laser treatment. I was actually going to buy this: [vissbeauty dot com] and do it myself at home. But I have no idea how well it’ll work. Does anyone have any info or experience with it? I’m very fair skinned and my hair is very fine and some is light and some is dark.
Sorry, I know this post was all over the place. It’s really comforting to just be able to talk about this freely and know that none of you are going to ask me if I have leprosy. It’s kind of like AA, “Hi, my name is GirlfromTX, and I’m a tweezeaholic.”
Thought I would check in…My hair plucking on my legs has decreased a lot. It has not been easy though. I simply made just forced myself to stop. I guess like someone would quit smoking. I have never seen a professional about this.
I have been putting creams, shaving more often and just trying to take care of my legs. I think I had one or two episodes since I last posted of plucking. I think I can do this.
It’s hard, I had to lie down a few times and deep breathe to stop myself, or just yell at myself, I guess that’s my internal dialoge. I find that the more they are healing up, the less I want to do it know, because I don’t want to have them get worse again. I am also slowly changing my diet. Eliminating junk food, sugar and diet drinks. Basically just trying to care for myself, treating myself with kindness etc…
I’ll let you know again how it goes for me, hopefully next time I come back here, I wont be doing this anymore.
I’ve kept an eye on this thread for the past few years, and I came across it again yesterday so I thought I’d share my story with you all.
I started tweezing/plucking out my leg hairs years ago, I think I was about 15, I’m now 22. It was an obsession, it provided satisfaction and although I didnt know it, it was my way of lowering anxiety. I used to get a lot of ingrown hairs too as I used to wax, and I would spend hours hunting for them, squeezing them out. As you can imagine, I was left with lots of scarring, red/purple spots and blotches all over my legs. It was absolutely horrible. I haven’t been able to wear shorts or skirts for years and I dread it when summer comes along. I hated my legs so much that i just couldnt look at them.
I looked at my legs properly yesterday, the first time in months, and I noticed that my legs are looking so much better. Thinking back, I realised that I haven’t tweezed/plucked/squeezed anything for months and it was a really proud moment. Now I feel like its given me a reason to stop tweezing for good. Obviously my legs aren’t completely healed, but the red and purple spots are so much smaller and paler now than they used to be. I still have tiny bumps on my legs but I doubt anyone would be able to notice them from far away, and I’m confident that they will get better with time too.
I’m currently using a home laser hair removal method which is working slowly. Eventually it will mean that I won’t have to worry about never being able to get a close enough shave as the hair follicles will be destroyed by the laser, and more importantly, it will stop the compulsion to tweeze.
The best thing you can do is to tell someone, it was such a relief when I told my sister, and when I did she reassured me that it wasnt as bad as i thought. If you can afford it, aim for laser hair removal. Also stop waxing or epilating by all means, and start shaving. You wont tweeze if there’s nothing there to tweeze.
I just wanted to let you all know that the scars will fade. It takes a long time, probably years, but if you stop tweezing, they will go. There is no quick fix, so dont waste your money on creams like i have in the past. Good luck to everyone.
I’m glad you’re getting a handle on this issue! Good for you.
Just FYI though - home laser machines don’t provide permanent removal. It’s all temporary. If you want permanent results, you need professional treatments with powerful machines.
It’s been a few days since I’ve plucked and it’s driving me crazy… I keep shaving but it really doesn’t do much all those black dots are still there. Yesterday I went to the beach it has been forever and I was so self conscious I was having panic attacks. I wore board shorts to hide the top part because I think other people will find it gross. The bottom of my legs between the knee and ankle look so bad. Red and scabbed I hate it. My son is 6 and loves the beach and fishing so I need to be able to go out and wear some kind of bathing suit, I truly bites. I keep reading the posts on this forum and it helps me not grab the tweezers so thank you all for posting!!!
I dread today because I really need to pluck my eyebrows. I have been doing really great. I haven’t pluck my legs since Friday at least now with tweezers. I still have a difficult time when I see my legs. I scratch and dig with my finger nails but not as much. No one is home and I am getting the uni-brow so I have to so something. The temptation is crazy once the tweezers are in my hands. I feel so relax and satisfied while plucking but completely guilty and depressed afterward. I love grabbing onto to a hair and watching those black spots turn into a long hair and and then seeing it pull from all the way under the skin it makes me feel free and clean I guess.
I think before I do my eyebrows (which I always do to thin) I will shave. Since shaving barely does anything for me I was thinking of exfoliating my legs first and then as I shave squeezing the skin in sections so the hairs stand up in hopes that I will get a better result. Has anyone ever tried this and does it work?
You can get your eyebrows threaded. Have you tried it? It’s cheap at only $5-8 and they usually do a great job. That can keep you away from having to pluck unnecessarily. I used to pluck my eyebrows too often and damage the skin. So I got electrolysis and shaped them well permanently. Now I don’t need to touch them.
I also got laser treatments on my legs. I would highly recommend it. You can get just 3-4 treatments and you won’t have any dots after shaving. It’ll get rid of a good 50-60% of the hair already and shaving will be super easy because the remaining hair will be fine and sparse. Or you can have a full set of treatments, i.e. 6-8 treatments spaced 2-3 months apart to get rid of 95%+ of the hair permanently.
Checking in again. I am doing better. It is a slow process, but as my legs get better I don’t want to pluck them.
I recently bought one of those face mirrors which magnify 10x. I am now “obsessed” with keeping my eyebrows perfect. I don’t over do them though. I really enjoy doing this and it has taked the focus off of my legs which I barely think about anymore.
I shape them very nice, though and I am not over plucking them. The mirror is great, I love it and it has helped me to focus on something else than my legs.
this is something that is hard for me to talk about, it comes with a lot of shame and feelings of being sick to my stomach thinking about it. It started after my father passed and i took up a night shift job at a gas station i would get bored and found myself looking in the mirror. It started small a hair on my shoulder then escalated to my neck hair my eye brows- my fingers and toes, and other places. Not all my hair just hair that seems out of place. I loose hours tweaking out over it. i’ll often pluck til the point of bleeding. I need to stop. I want to stop. I jsut cant it. I dont know how. I’m trying to hard to love myself and i do, but i just cant stop. its maddening. when i find a spot its all i can think about and the first thing i do when i get home is head to the bathroom mirror. my girlfriend gets upset with me but she has patience. I just dont know what to do. it gets to the point im bleeding and about to cry.
Have you considered seeing a specialist for OCD?
Most of this is stress-related and also hereditary predesposition.
It’s come across my mind- i used to be a psych major so when i started to not be able to stop i quickly was calling out little things like Trichotillomania and OCD- but it just isn’t in my cards atm to go see a specialist- I have no insurance + trying to pay off all my college loans + a few hospital bills- barely making it as is with those. I’ve started to try to get into meditation but I have A.D.H.D so my attention span cuts me short. I honestly feel like im not a person anymore with all this. It’s relieving to know that other people do so. I’m afraid to really talk to anyone after i’ve been tweaking i feel so alienated by it- the red bumps that come with tweaking. I’ll even dig out a hair if it isn’t ripe yet.
o.o;;;; 
I keep checking this thread, hoping that somebody has found some miracle cure for the SPOTS! urgh. I know that they are caused from all the trauma I’ve caused to my legs and bikini area. Like many of you, I will not wear shorts so I’m feeling especially embarrassed and anxious now that summer is arriving. I know I’ll have to come up with another million excused to avoid swimming or going out at all. Not really looking forward to hearing ‘oh my god! it’s so hot out!! why do you have pants on!?!’ cringe
For the most part, I’ve stopped tweazing- it’s really not that hard! Admittedly, I still pluck out the really bad ones that seem to scream ‘DEAL WITH ME!’ whenever I look at those areas. I’ve found that using an electric razor has been a huge help. Shaving with disposables (any kind)irritates my skin beyond belief! Then I am stuck with red bumps that i know I can’t resist picking at. I’ve seen a major improvement. I don’t have silky smooth legs like you get from shaving with a sharp razor, but I don’t give a flyin you-know-what compared to having ingrown hairs and razor bumps.
My plan to get rid of the bumps: I bought a dermaroller! I got mine from owndoc but you can get em all over. I did my research and they had the best price I could find. I’m going to repair the scaring on my legs with their specialized single needles and vitamin C serum. I DO NOT work for their website, they got my money- not the other way around. I’m just posting because I found this
[owndoc dot com/dermarolling-video]
and I freaked! So I’m going to follow her instructions for the next few months (there will be other summers…) and I will post any updates here for lurkers like myself. I’ve also made some diet changes…cutting out fatty oily foods and taking vitamins.
So here I am, crossing my fingers. I’m 24 years old and tired of hiding… that’s all folks.