Dealing with Ingrown Hairs
Ingrown hairs can be an unsightly and painful blemish on your skin. The best solution is avoiding them altogether by maintaining good shaving habits. However, if you’ve fallen into inconsistent shaving habits, or your skin is simply taking time to adjust after switching to a new type of razor, you’re likely to experience a few ingrown hairs.
Shallow ingrown hairs are mainly just a minor annoyance and can often be loosed by a gentle pinch. Deeper ingrown hairs can be much more of a pain though. In these cases, the skin around an ingrown hair can form into a painful lump, not unlike the appearance of cystic acne.
The first thing you don’t want to do is treat an ingrown hair as you might an acne spot. You don’t want to pick at or squeeze the lump (and honestly, you wouldn’t want to do this with acne either). An ingrown hair continues to grow beneath the surface of your skin, often irritating and inflaming your skin all on its own. You don’t need to make the situation worse, especially since you’re not going to succeed in “popping” an ingrown hair anyway. Leave the lump alone at first and allow the inflammation to die out.
Sometimes a deep ingrown hair will puncture through to the surface by itself. However, other times the hair will continue to grow under your skin, forming loops or spirals. If it emerges on its own, great. Get out your tweezers and, in a smooth and gentle motion, pluck the problem hair out. You want to be careful to pluck the entire hair out, as otherwise the hair may break and force you to play the waiting game again. The enzymes in your cells can weaken the strength of an ingrown hair over time, making these hairs more easily broken.
When an ingrown hair does not show any signs of breaking the surface of your skin, you still need to be patient for the inflammation to go down. You should wait and allow the hair to grow until the dark line of the hair is clearly visible from the surface of your skin. Now, using a sterilized needle, gently puncture the skin, aiming to hook underneath the hair and pull it out. It is of utmost importance not to attempt this if the hair is not clearly visible. You don’t want to start poking yourself randomly with needles and end up trading an ingrown hair for a scar. See a dermatologist if you are not confident releasing the hair yourself. You may find that a stubborn ingrown hair can grow over an inch, usually forming a tight spiral, before you’re able to get it out. Once the hair is exposed you can repeat the same process with the tweezers to remove it.
Never pick at ingrown hairs, as besides causing the inflammation to worsen, you can also cause a patch of scar tissue to build up above the area, making it that much hard to remove the hair. As with acne, this can also easily happen if you are impatient and try to attack the problem prematurely. Ingrown hairs are both a less visible and shorter lasting skin problem if you are patient and smart when dealing with them.
