Unwanted hair is a reality for everybody, whether men or women. Today, I’d like to discuss the removal of unwanted hair for women, and I’ll discuss temporary hair removal and in another video discuss permanent hair removal. There are two levels at which you can do temporary hair removal. The first is removing the hair just at the surface of the skin and the other is removing it all the way from the bottom from the root. Let’s talk about the surface removal first. Obviously the easiest, fastest and least expensive is just shaving. Shaving your legs in the shower is a regular routine for many women and it’s no big deal. If you have unwanted facial hair, women are appropriately and understandably somewhat emotionally reluctant to shave their faces and so that may not be a suitable form for that hair removal. The other way of removing it at the surface is with chemical depilatories which are chemicals which usually have alkali and sulfur in them that actually dissolves the hair. You see hair is made of keratin and these substances actually dissolve keratin, the problem is there’s keratin in the surface of your skin so if you use it too strong, too much or too long you can actually dissolve off some of your skin and get an irritation or a burn. So, usually there are instructions about testing it and making sure that you don’t use it in sensitive areas and you don’t use it too long. Regardless which of these techniques you use, you’re going to have to repeat the maintenance everyday or every other day depending on the rate of growth of your hair. Other techniques involve removing the hair from the root and whether that’s plucking, waxing or threading, they all run the risk of increased incidence of ingrown hairs and there are a lot of episodes on DermTV where I discuss why waxing causes ingrown hairs and how to treat ingrown hairs and so on. But on the other hand, because you’re removing the hair from the root, maintenance is much less infrequent because it takes the hair much longer to grow back. Of those three techniques waxing is pretty fast because it removes a lot of hair at one time, as opposed to plucking or threading which removes individual hairs, plucking is inexpensive you can do it by yourself but of course it’s time consuming and threading is usually done by professionals and despite the fact that they are removing one hair at a time, I must tell you the way I’ve seen professional threaders remove hair, they remove it remarkably quickly. So, all of these forms of hair removal have advantages, disadvantages but they all have in common the fact that they’re temporary, they require some maintenance and in another episode we’ll talk about laser hair removal and electrolysis which are permanent forms of hair removal.