What Are the Best Epilation Tips?

Epilation is a hair removal process that extracts hair from the roots by pulling it out with an epilator, which is a device that is essentially composed of several rapidly rotating tweezer heads. Helpful tips to maximize the effectiveness of the hair removal often include using a bright light source or epilator attachment, epilating longer hairs rather than shorter ones, and altering the speed and direction of epilation for different areas. However, the most useful epilation tips, according to many users, are simply ideas about how to reduce the pain and discomfort felt during the process. These ideas can include using heat or ice, only epilating short hair, and using certain attachments that make the experience more comfortable.

One of the most common epilation tips from experienced users is to make sure to use a bright light source. Epilating in dim lighting can not only lead to missed stray hairs, but can also make it more likely that loose folds of skin or raised bumps such as moles or ingrown hairs may get caught between the tweezer heads, which may cause bleeding. Epilator light attachments illuminate tiny, almost invisible hairs more clearly so that the hair removal is more complete and the skin is left smoother.

Epilation tips are often contradictory on how long the hair should be when it is removed. Longer hairs will be picked up by the epilator more easily than short hairs, which will lead to more rapid hair removal at the expense of increased pain, while epilating shorter hairs means that the epilator grabs fewer hairs at once, reducing both discomfort and the overall effectiveness of the epilation. Common epilation tips also differ on the most desirable speed settings and whether hairs should be epilated with or against the grain of growth. Setting the epilator on the highest speed and epilating against hair growth will remove the hairs very quickly, but may cause some hair to break off instead of being removed at the root. To reduce the amount of hair breakage, many epilator users recommend epilating with the grain of hair growth instead of against it, and keeping the epilator on a relatively low speed.

Many epilator users take warm baths or showers before epilating in the hopes that the hair and skin will be softened and the follicles loosened enough to make the hair extraction more comfortable. Others smooth an ice cube briefly over the skin before and after epilating an area to numb and soothe the skin. Epilator attachments, such as cooling pads and covers that prevent all but a few of the tweezer heads from grasping hair at one time, can also make the epilation experience more comfortable.