Why Can’t I Get Hairless Legs For 2 Weeks?

Q. I’m aware of that hair grows in different cycles. No matter how often I epilate  every day, twice a week, once a week , I always end up having stubble all over my legs the day after I epilate. And they are very much visible. It is so frustrating.

My epilator is not the best hair epilator, but I’m sure it grabs the hairs from root because I can feel the pain. My question is how you girls can have hairless legs for 2 weeks? It seems impossible to me. I don’t know what I am doing wrong! I really need some advice!

A.

I completely understand your frustration. Hopefully we can figure this out together sweetheart. Hair that is plucked cleanly at the root shouldn’t grow back the next day. There are two things that are likely happening.

1) The epilator is breaking your hair.
2) The hair growth cycle.

How can you tell what the problem is? You can sort of narrow it down by feeling the way the hair grows back. When hair is broken, it is cut off at an angle much like shaving, which is why it can feel like stubble the next day. A properly epilated hair is removed from the root, so when the hair starts to grow back it has a very fine tip with no stubble. When you epilate hair, look at the plucked hair. You should be able to see the root like structure at the end of most of the hairs.

If you think your hair is breaking see this article:

http://www.epilatorcentral.com/why-is-the-epilator-breaking-my-hair/

As you mentioned, the second reason for this is because of the hair growth cycle. You haven’t aligned your hair to grow out at the same time. I have sort of covered this before but haven’t exactly told you how to align your hair cycles so hopefully I can better explain it now.

You will not be smooth after you first epilate. I just want to briefly go over what is happening. Hair could be lying just underneath the surface of the skin and it might grow out just a few days after you epilate. Why? On average, for the legs, only about 20% of your hair is growing above the skin. The rest is below the skin.

When you first start epilating, your hair is in a ridiculous amount of hair growth cycles. With epilation, you have to try to align all of the cycles to around 3 to 4 batches. Before you can get 2 weeks of hairless skin, you have to pluck each hair at least once using a set interval that is in line with how long it takes your hair to grow out. For some people it can take several months before all the hairs start coming out at the same time. Epilating is a commitment but it can be worth it.

Each hair you remove on the legs should on average take 28 days to grow out. This can vary from person to person and area to area. For the legs, this range can vary between 4 – 6 weeks. In theory, if it takes 28 days for our hair to grow back, we want to epilate after 28 days to align the hair cycles.

As soon as you pluck a hair, it goes into the resting phase and stimulates the growth of a new hair. The goal is to synch all the stages of growth so that the hair comes in at roughly the same time. What interval should we choose? We can use 4 weeks or a monthly schedule, but I know you mentioned that you would like to be smooth for 2 weeks. Let’s use an interval of 2 weeks.

It’s a bit complicated to explain, but it turns out if it takes our hair to grow out 28 days, we can also use a period of epilating every 2 weeks to align our cycles.

It is easier to align your hair growth cycles in the winter when your legs are covered up because you don’t have to worry about the growth. It is a bit difficult to align your hair growth cycles with epilation since we can epilate at just about any time, but here is how to align your cycles. Try to wait about 4 weeks(28 days) for your hair to grow out so you can catch as many of them as you can in the same growth cycle. Before epilating, trim the hair down to about 1/8th of an inch. Epilate your hair.

Wait for the hair to grow out for two weeks without shaving, tweezing, or epilating in between. Be patient. The reason for this is we don’t want to misalign the hair growth by shifting the interval. If you epilate as soon as you see the hair, you will have to continue to epilate daily to remain smooth since. The key is to be consistent with your interval without epilating or removing hair in between.

Continue to epilate every 2 weeks, remembering to trim the hair before. After around 3 -4 months, you will have had a chance to remove almost every hair from the root at least once. This is the time when you should start to experience longer periods of smooth skin.

Hope this helps!