Manual Shaving and Common Myths

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts Hi, I'm Xing Singh, and I'm Simon Jack, and together we host Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast exploring how some of the world's richest people made their fortunes . And we're back for a new season with a brand new lineup of billionaires. Yeah, global pop icon Beyonce. Hollywood movie director Steven Spielberg. Football superstar Christiana Renalo, anyone? And as ever, we're asking you to decide whether they're good, bad or just another billionaire. That's good, bad, billionaire. Listen first and BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Greg Foot and welcome to Slice Bread, the show that investig ates the Wonder Products promising to make you happier, healthier, or greener. Each episode, we follow the crumbs of evidence to find out if one of your suggested Wonder Products is indeed the best thing since Slice Bread or Marketing BS Today's suggestion comes from Karen Jeffrey's from Kent. Welcome to the studio Karen. Hello, thank you for having me. Thanks for coming. What wonder product would you like us to investigate today? Hair removal devices . Where, if I may ask, do you want to remove hair from? It feels quite interesting to speak to somebody we've only met just now . Obviously the legs, armpits and some other places, Greg, is it mainly a summer thing or is this a all year thing? Summer and special occasions? Yeah . So what is your go to strategy at the moment for summer and special occasions? I always end up shaving because it's straightforward and easy and just immediate as well. Have you tried waxing? Yeah, I've tried the strips that you get at home. When I was a teenager, I started off having a gome and then it got stuck to my leg. Oh , so then I was trying to like sort of get it off in the b ath and it was just sticking even stronger . So then I went and had it done in a salon I've done the cream at home and then obviously with eyebrows tweezering. I'm better at the waxing on the eyebrows now. Like once you do get into it, it is easy. You've tried epilators? Oh yeah, they're painful. Right. So actually you're looking for a solution that's as pain free as possible as well. Yeah, and also not leaving bobbly legs as well because the apparatus are painful and then they just leave these red dots. And so you've got wait for that to subside by which point all those hairs that were too fine to get up in the first place ping ping ping, ping ping they've all come out again . I think this is something that lots and lots of people resonate with. Have you seen any particular products that you'd like us to look at today? So I've seen these zappers online and also in the shops and staff. Zappers, I think their official title is IPL devices which I looked up. It sounds for intense pulse light . Yes. So what would you like to know about these IPL devices? The biggest one is are they safe? Then there's the cost benefit sort of side of it as well. So I assumed that you were zapped and then that was it. But speaking to other friends and stuff, girly chats, turns out no you've got to shave first and then you zap and then oh my goodness it doesn't even finish there.' Youve got to zap again even more times. And I'm like, Oh, that seems a lot of work, doesn't it? For something that's supposed to save me time. And then how effective are they with different coloured hairs and stuff like that? Well, you are very much not alone in wanting long lasting smoothness. Loads of emails sent into sliced. on this very topic. Let me pick out two for you. Listener, Susanna said she has used an IPL and absolutely loves it, but she's asked if there are any concerns with using it on your skin, especially on moles and freckles . She's also asked if we should be worried about the effect of the bright flashes on our eyes . Yes. On the adverts they',ve got sunglasses. And listener Safi wrote, I am a South Asian lady with very dark hair. Are some methods of hair removal more suitable than others depending on skin type and hair type? So let me introduce the expert who going to help' uss st rip away the marketing with over thirty five years running multiple research projects on skin, hair follicles and scalp biology. She's not going to be plucking answers out of nowhere, I tell you . She is a skin and hair biologist and honorary visiting lecturer at the University of Bradford, Dr. Jill Westgate. Hi Jill. Hi, Greg. Jill, first question I have to ask, you have previously consulted for cosmetic companies. Any of that for hair removal products? Yes, I did some work with Phillips to test the efficacy of the IPL devices that they were developing and I also worked with them on a European Mari Curie funded project to look at light skin and hair interactions in general. And are you currently working with or consulting on anything related to these hair removal devices? No, nothing current. You feel you can be impartial here? Absolutely, yes. Let's talk hair then. Why is our hair not just conveniently only on our heads? So we have hair follicles all over our body and the only place you don't have them is the palms of your hand and the soles of your feet and the hair grows in different parts of the body to different lengths and different thicknesses . But on our head we have long terminal hair, we have terminal hair in our underarms and in our groin . The rest of the body has a hair type called velus hair which typically grows to a shorter length and then there's a bit of a gender difference. So women tend to have less body hair than men . there And are also some ethnic variations as well. Okay, so hairs can either be terminal, that's longer, thicker, darker hair, or velus, which are smaller, finer hairs often grow to a shorter length. And to listen to Safi's question , how much does hair vary between people ? Hair is what we call a trait . So across the world there are curly hair, straight hair, there are people who've got more facial hair, more body hair. It is something that is quite self defining and it also compartmentalises people within perhaps different groupings and that can be by biology or by culture as well. So hair is quite different , but actually the fibers themselves are all made of the same stuff. They have typically the same proteins in them and the same structure. It's just perhaps the size and the degree of curl , curvature and melanin content, which is variable. And a crucial question, Jill, are there certain parts of the body or certain types of hair that grow back faster, so therefore may need more regular removal? Or does all hair grow at roughly the same rate? The actual thing that you have to think about is not so much the hair growth rate but the hair growth cycle and this is something I've spent my whole career studying . Hair grows for a certain period of time . And obviously the longer it grows, the longer the hair. But when the cycle kicks in and the hair follicle goes to a kind of regression stage, it produces a smaller dormant follicle . That follicle itself has very little blood supply, it doesn't have any melanin in it anymore. I do want to make a note that all the emails and the messages that we got requesting an episode on hair removal devices were from women this. And just reinforces the point that there's a very strong societal expectation on women in particular when it comes to hair removal . Yes, definitely. And that isn't something that is recent. I was just reading something in new scientists that said that hair removal devices have been around for millennia . So we do have this kind of relationship I think between losing body hair and a feeling of either beauty or cleanliness . Does that resonate with you, Karen? Yeah, there's sort of two sides to me that I'm kind of thinking, Oh, it's quite nice to have smooth eggs. And then I think, no, I shouldn't be bothered about how it looks. I'm a confident person, I don't need to do this. So I do have a little argument with myself sometimes and I can understand that as well, Karen. And I think that the important thing is to recognize that while many people like yourself perhaps you could go out on the beach without having shaved your legs first. For some people it is psychologically really important to them to not have that as a worry and therefore there are some people for whom hair removal is part of their ability to even leave the house. Well, let's have a look at ways that we can remove hair then. Let's start with good old shaving because Karen, you always end up reverting back to this, you said. I don't want to get into razors too much because we actually did a previous episode on cartridge razors a few years back. But Jill, just to summarize that, would you suggest going for a razor with two blades rather than one? So I would even say I wouldn't use anything that didn't have four blades in it . They also have a little strip often on the razor which enables the razor to glide better. Lubricating strip. Yes, we discussed lubricating strip, yeah. And then when you're talking about a close shave, then the way that the blade works is that if you shave with the hair, the first blade kind of lifts the hair fibers slightly off the surface of the skin and then the next blade cuts it a bit closer and the next blade cuts it a bit closer still. And so I would say shaving in the direction of hair growth if possible is probably safer and you would avoid getting the kind of little nicks that you get because when you look at the hair follicle, you imagine that it's growing like a rod out of a flat surface, but the skin isn't like that. The hairs grow at an angle. There can be a slight bump on the underside of where the hair is growing and if you pull that hair backwards you raise that bump and then you can clip it. So the multiblade razors and with the direction of hair growth if possible I think is less irritating overall. Here's a crucial shaving related question , Jill. Does shaving your hair make it grow back thicker? No simple complete myth. Complete myth. The impression is because when you cut the hair, you leave a glunt surface and that blunt surface so you feel it more. I want to get to IPLs, but before that, let's move from manual to electric devices and let's start with epilators. And perhaps first Jill, you could explain what epilation is because it's different, isn't it to depillation? Yeah, so epilation means to pull the hair out from the root and depolation is more the sort of surface hair removal which would include shaving. So a razor depolates, it just removes the hairshaft, whereas an epilator by definition removes the whole hair, so including the base, the bulb, the bit that the hair shaft grows from. So what we could say is when you epilate you're really getting to the root of the problem . You could indeed. Let's look at just one of these epilators and get into those details, Jill. So let's look at the Bronze Silk Epill . It says it uses twenty tweezers to quote easily remove even short hairs for weeks of smooth skin. So is that what these devices are then? They're essentially an array of tiny tweezers? Exactly. And some of them might have some other attributes like perhaps cooling or something like that to remove the pain that comes with pulling your hair out. Karen, I don't know about you, but that idea of pulling the whole hair out, I thought then that'd be it'd be gone. But they're saying here that it promises you only weeks of smooth skin. Yeah, I think it's because it doesn't pick up all the little hairs. It can't necessarily get a grip on it. So certainly for me and you can kind of go over and over but it's not completely done it and then it grows back and then a couple of weeks later it grows back. There are remnants of the follicle that are left be hind and those contain cells which can actually regenerate a brand new hair follicle over time. And that usually takes maybe four to six weeks. So epulation is not manent hair removal. However, anecdotally when you talk to people who do epulation , they do say that the hair does eventually grow back shorter and finer and less pigmented . But for me, it leaves like all red bubbly skin and then can't go out for a while and then defeats the purpose. Yeah, Jill, what are those red bubbles that Karen's describing? So when you pull the hair out, you're creating a little bit of trauma and you might get a little bit of inflammation. Some of the companies will give you maybe some preparations that you can put on that helps to calm the skin back down again. Another common form of epilation is of course waxing. You apply wax to the target area that wax sticks to or hard ens around the hair, then when you remove it it plucks the hair out. Producer Kate did think it might be very fun for me to try some waxing live on the show. Sadly we've just got so much to get through. We're not going to have time to squeeze that in. Sorry . Most people go to a salon for a wax, but you can also get these at home waxing products. Superdrug offer a sensitive warm wax treatment for nine pounds, includes two hundred and fifty millilitres of sugar wax plus ten strips and a spatula. Or you can get similar kits on Amazon. We found one that is stripless. You microwave the wax, apply it with a wooden spatula, then quote, peel it off to reveal long lasting smoothness . Jill it's similar to epilators, isn't it? That you're actually pulling the hairs out. Exactly. You're just using a different method of doing the pulling. The really negative thing about waxing is that you've got to actually have quite long hair for it to be really effective. And that means that you've got to grow your hair and not put your legs on show . This is why I end up on the shaving again. Right. If you've got two things happening close to each other where you've got to get your legs out, well, yep, hard luck. You don't have time to wait . I saw a couple of questions from listeners about another popular depilation method, so one that only removes the hairshaft, not the follicle or the bulb, and that's hair removal creams. Two brands have cornered the market here, Vit and Nehr. It looks like Vit is a bit more expensive than Nair, but both seem to use the same key ingredients potassium, thioglycolate and calcium hydroxide. How do they go about removing hair gill? Though they do it with two chemical mechanisms. One is a higher pH and high pH hair swells and the other breaks dissulfide bonds and hair is full of dissulfide bonds. So if you break those chemical bonds the ha,ir becomes essentially easier to remove from the surface of the skin. They say that you're supposed to wait five or ten minutes after you've applied it and then there say wipe away with a warm towel, Vit say remove with a spatula. In return you're supposed to get in the words of Nair, smooth results for up to six days on legs. Does that match your experience, Karen? It's been a while since I had a go because it made my legs tingly. Ah , so it says to remove it quite quickly, but then it wasn't working enough and so it would leave hairs behind and then I'm back to the shaving again . So the size and the thickness of the hair and the length of it will have a big impact on how quickly the chemicals work. So for finer, thinner hairs they'll probably work quite effectively, but if you've got coarse hair, then the time for the chemicals to get into the hair and for the hair to soften and be able to be cleaved off is going to be longer. You wouldn't use it necessarily on terminal sites, but you could use it on the shorter hairs, say in the bikini area and on the legs. These creams come with a lot of caveats and warnings. Vet, for example, state that it is not suitable for use on the face, eyes, nose, ears, around the genitals or nipples, and they say that you should not use it on varicose veins, scars, moles, or spotty, broken, irritated or sunburnt skin. Yeah, they're potentially quite irritating and that 's why the time is short because you don't want to put the chemicals on your skin for too long and you don't want to get any penetration of those chemicals down in the hair follicle. Yeah, I should say that you can get specific products for the face from both Vet and Nair and some of these products do have added moisturizing ingredients as well to make them a bit kinder to your skin. Okay Karen, that covers shaving the hairs off, yanking them out with an epilator, weakening them and scraping them off or rubbing them off with a cream. If you don't fancy any of them, and I don't blame you if so, perhaps this is where one of these intense pulsed light devices IPL's could help. Price wise these zappers as you called them, they're a big jump . So you can get IPLs for under forty quid, but they're more often at least a couple a hundred pounds. Karen, you and listener Susanna mentioned the brand Braun. If you go for their most premium IPL, the Skin Eye Expert Pro seven and get it with all the attachments, it's going to be over a grand. My goodness. What investment. There will be a range of prices. The devices that have more attachments will be more expensive and you just need to decide whether you want to remove hair from all your body sites or whether you're just targeting say your legs. Jill, how do these IPL devices work? Well, what they do is shine light into your skin, the red light end of the spectrum can penetrate quite deep because melanin in the follicle bulb absorbs light in that kind of range of wavelengths and it heats up. The red light or the IPL light causes the follicle melanin to create thermal damage inside the follicle and then that helps to destroy that follicle's hair cycle. So IPLs are using this light to heat up the hair follicles, specifically heat up the melanin in the hair follicle and destroy it essentially. Is that process painful? It can be. From what I've understood, the pain can come from two different sources. One is if the skin tone is a little bit darker , the melanin in the epidermis will also heat up. So quite a lot of the devices have a cool ing device which cool the surface of the skin so the melanin in the skin doesn't heat up and that helps to remove that level of pain. The other is that the hair shaft if it's very dark but absorb the light and heat up and that can give a little bit of pain associated with that process . But for lighter skinned people who've got darker hair, generally speaking , then these products will work pretty effectively. Yes, I noticed that a lot of product s do clearly say who these devices work best for. So on the Braun website they provide a chart showing quote suitable and unsuitable skin and hair colours for IPL treatment, pointing out that dark or black skin and blonde red or grey hair are not suitable. So if the skin tone is darker, the light can be absorbed by the melanin in the epidermis and then that can cause issues in the skin . And then for people who've got very light hair or who've got grey hair, the quantitative melanin and the follicle bulb isn't big enough and therefore you don't get enough thermal damage and therefore the follicle won't reject the hair. Yeah, it makes sense. So if these IPLs are targeting the melanin, there needs to be enough melanin in the hair to heat it up. And if they are targeting melanin, I can see why skin containing more melanin is at risk of absorb ing that heat. Exactly. Is that why these devices have different intensity settings, Jill? So I think the intensity setting is to allow variable hair growth patterns on different parts of the body to be treated , terminal hairs will have a deeper follicle. So the energy required to heat up the melanin in a deep follicle may be more than in a shallow follicle. So that's how they work. Let's go on to how you should use them. I'm going to quote from the instructions from one of the products the Ferreos Peach to Go . They say you should start by shaving all visible hair from the area you wish to treat. Yeah, you're still going to do the shaving before you use it. And then it gets worse because then you've got to do it in set amounts of time. Yes. Some say you need to use them weekly, some say you need to use them multiple times a week and the soonest they promise that you actually see results is after two weeks. This isn't Jill an instant hair removal solution like shaving or waxing? No, I mean because it's actually affecting a biological process so you're actually creating a situation where the follicle rejects the current hair because on the body , not all hair follicles are producing a hair at once. You need to be continually going through the process of exposing those follicles to the light , which is why it takes quite a few treatments to get to a kind of steady state. These devices do say that companies describe the full treatment taking twelve weeks, three months of at least weekly use , after which you can then be in a maintenance phase when you only have to use it monthly , but using it monthly would surely be preferable to needing to shave a lot more regularly. Yeah, but then I'm going to have to do it all the way through the year, aren't I? To keep it going. Yeah. Good point. And in some body areas you might even have to wait longer because some hairs just sit there quietly in their kind of dormant stage for several months. And I think the consumer needs to balance that effort with perhaps the alternative which is to go to a clinic and have it done professionally and that might still take six sessions to get clearance of the hair, but clinics are allowed to use higher energy devices , which means that the chances of actually killing the follicle for good is higher. These companies do make promises about how effective their IPLs are supposed to be. I'm going to quote Foreo say that the peach to go reduces hair by ninety percent in four uses, which will only take you a month if they're using it once a week. The company you like say that their IPL can achieve ninety six percent hair reduction in just two weeks. So this suggests quite a significant visible impact quite quickly. Yeah, but it does leave some hairs behind, doesn't it? Then it's a percentage? Yeah, and they're all based on the company's internal testing as well. Jill, do we have any independent evidence for what people can reasonably expect from these IPLs? There are quite a lot of clinical studies where devices have been tested and of proper scientific study. And from what I've said, you're looking at a hair loss or lower hair density effectiveness of maybe fifty percent or sixty percent . And if you're trying to decide which IPL to buy for home use, is a more powerful one, a more effective one or is that actually a more dangerous one? I would say all the home use devices that are produced by reputable manufacturers will be oper ational in a very safe window. I think the danger if you like is probably related to your sensitivity to the light and not necessarily to the device per se. One of the things that the instructions say is not to repeatedly flash or treat the same area repeatedly on the same occasion and that is because obviously you could continue to do damage even after there's damage been creat ed and you wouldn't want to do that. I think most of the devices I've had to look at I don't think you would get an additional negative effect unless you use them at too high an energy. But they recommend you do a patch test and that gives you an idea of how much fluence which is the term we use for energy you are required to use for each body part. If someone is using these long term, there are a concern about the impact it's having on your skin? I mean, listen to Susanna asked specifically if there is a risk of cancer from using these devices. No, there's no risk to the skin itself and the devices are for home use are really well controlled from a safety point of view. There are some contrindications like don't use them on very highly pigmented moles . On any broken skin or irritated skin, you could generate a little bit more inflammation than perhaps you would like, but no there's no evidence that they're related to the generation of cancer. Yeah, looking at some of the warnings on Ulike's Air ten IPL. They say caution is still required when using on small tattoos or moles and suggest you don't use it if you have any of a range of skin factors from dermatitis to eczema to scabs or healed wounds. And also interestingly, if you're menstruating, pregnant or breastfeeding. What's the thoughts there? So I would say that there is no sort of generalized physiological reasons why not to use them. Maybe it's just the classic warning that the tests have not been done on pregnant women x, etc . And there was an important question from listener Susanna who asked if these could damage your eyes . We saw Braun say that their Pro seven is eye safe and no protective glasses are required, but others like, the No Plus and the Arth IPL recommend eye protection or protective goggles. Why such different advice, Joe? There's the way that the device has regulated and I'm not a regulatory expert, so I don't know all the regulations, but person who's got facial hair should be really wary of home use devices because of the risks to their eyes. The devices that are activated when they are flat on the skin have a safety feature which means that they cannot then shine the light out of the device at any other time than when it's flat on the skin . But devices that don't have that as a safety feature will be the ones that recommend perhaps using goggles . I would pick a device that has a safety cutout, which means that when it's not on the skin there's no light coming out of it. Good advice. Just before I ask you the final question, Jill, some of the IPLs that we looked at seem to call themselves lasers. Now with my physics hat on, a laser is just one wavelength of light. So technically IPLs because they use multiple wavelengths aren't lasers, but there are legit las er treatments that you can get in a salon, aren't they? Are they essentially the same as an IPL but with one fixed wavelength at a stronger intensity? They're essentially doing the same job, but the lasers can be dialed up to be more powerful . They tend to have a slightly higher wavelength than the IPLs. The specific ity of the laser can be more highly tuned to the target in the skin, but I understand that a good IPL and a good laser for hair removal will give equally good results if used in the same clinic. And if IPLs suggest they're less effective on lighter hair colours and could pose safety concerns for darker skin tones. Is laser treatment out for those people? Yes, for the same reasons . Laser treatment is also expensive, maybe not far off one of these high end IPL devices . If you're wanting very permanent hair removal as opposed to the home use devices which as we've discussed give a more temporary effect then that's where a clinic would be a more advisable next step , spend your money. So a laser hair treatment can be permanent. I wouldn't say everything's a hundred percent permanent, but the lasers can deliver a more permanent hair reduction through multiple sessions. There are, of course, other salon treatments such as electrolysis, which is hair removal using a small needle and an electric current, possibly permanently. Is that permanent, Jill? So electrolysis tends to be more permanent than waxing or the home use IPLs, it's not dependent on the pigment for its effectiveness. There's also threading, which is when you use a loop of cotton twisted and rolled across the skin, traps hairs and pulls them out from the root as it goes. But just like with my live waxing session, unfortunately I just don't think we've got time to get into all of those today because I must put the final question to you, Jill. Let's try to summarize all of this. Are IPL devices that are promising painless hair removal that will keep your skin smoother for longer. Are they the best thing since sliced bread Jill or are they marketing BS? For people who have the time to use them use them according to the instructions and have none of the caveats that we've said where somebody whose skin type is not suitable , then I think they are a fantastic technology innovation and they have their place in the hair removal world . Are any methods of hair removal able to free Karen from shaving forever? Only a probably expensive trip to a clinic for several sessions with a laser. And finally, if someone has lighter hair or a darker skin tone and IPLs aren't an option, what would you recommend there? So for somebody who's got very light hair or grey hair, then maybe you would look at electroly sis because it's not dependent on the pigment for its effectiveness or the epilation methods or shaving and just being very, very careful about the direction of removal in both cases. Karen, final word goes to you. What do you think? Are you going to stick to shaving? You may be going to give one of these IPL devices a go? I think for the cost benefit, I'm going to stick with my shaving. Fair enough. I've explored it and that's fine and it's good to know that it's safe. I'm pleased to sort of put that one to rest and if over time they come down in price maybe I can go for that. But for now for your summer holidays and your special occasions shaving it is Well, with that, I shall wrap up this episode of Sliced Bread. A big thank you to Karen and Jill for joining me. And if you are listening to this and thinking, Greg, I have a wonder product I would really like you to investigate, please do send it over either on email to Sliced. bread at bbcot or as a message or a voice note on WhatsApp to zero seven five forty three six eight seven Next time we're looking at vibration plates . They were popular in the mid noughties and they are back , promising to boost your exercise, fat burn and circulation, improve your muscle tone and help with lymphatic drainage. Can using one for fifteen minutes really have the same impact as going for a run? And could the vibr ations be harmful in any way? I'll be finding out clear