Need Help Trimming/Thinning Chest And Arm Hair

First time poster. This site has been really helpful though, hopefully you can help me out with this.

I’m pretty hairy overall, but really I’d just like a way to reduce the thickness of my body hair. I don’t want to shave it off completely and I don’t want it to be too noticable or to have that “stubbly” look.

I trimmed by arm hair with scissors once and found that it worked pretty good. Definitely looked less hairly, but it was uneven and patchy in spots.

Is there any consensus on electric shavers for men when wanting to trim down (but not shave entirely) body hair?

I’ve seen some suggestions for Wahl and Norelco shavers. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanx.

[ May 22, 2004, 04:44 AM: Message edited by: stasis ]

Stasis:

Remington makes a good beard trimmer that you can adjust to 9 lenght settings.

Start with a standard hair clipper by Wahl or whoever. Use the 1/2" to 1/4" attachments - whatever you think looks good. The hairs will end up being longer than 1/2" to 1/4" however, since a lot of them lay pretty flat to the skin, especially on your arms and legs. So the resultant look is very natural - at least for me. There is still hair there, just not long and curly.

I use a beard trimmer I bought at Target for 20ish bucks. It is the same one I use to trim my sideburns. I use the “4” setting and buzz my chest/stomach with it, then shower. The next day, I’ll look in the mirror to see if there are any patches I missed and touch up. Then, I’ll put the guard down to the “1” setting (closest) and to the sides of my belly. A hair trimmer has a wider blade, and would likely cut down on the time. But I’m cheap and I like the accuracy of the smaller blade.
It looks like I trimmed it for a week or so, not too obvious, though. After that, it starts to look much more natural. I use hair conditioner in the shower, after washing, to minimize the itchiness that can come from freshly trimmed hair.

My advice: Experiment, starting with the guard set at the highest level. You can always cut more off. Probably obvious, but be really careful around your nipples - catching one of those with the trimmer is easy and smarts quite a lot!

A set of Oster clippers with a set of varying blade guards is another good option. Very powerful and very fast. They are not real expesive either. That is what I started with and it worked very well. I’m lasered now and like it much better though.

RJC2001