Do you know what I think of body hairs? They are unaesthetic, annoying and they make me feel uncomfortable!
That’s not only my opinion so, getting rid of hairs has become part of everyday routine for a lot of women, and men too.
Of course, some people don’t think they are a problem and they don’t need to get rid of them.
If you look into the word “hair” you’ll find out a lot of information: composition, position on the body, diseases (hirsutism, hypertrichosis, villosity), inflammation, folliculitis, ingrown hairs, hairs on the face, on the back, on the legs, a lot of hairs, hairs everywhere and ways of removing them!
I am going to deal with the “hair issue” step by step and I am going to start by introducing the protagonist: the hair!
Body hairs, threadlike fine formations, are composed of cells rich in cheratin which makes them hard and strong.
We have got a lot of them! On average about five million hairs cover all our body, just a few parts are hairless. Their distribution depends on genetic and ethnic features.
Typically, Mediterranean men and women tend to have stronger hairs on arms, legs and face more than other people.
Of course, they are not only annoying lifelong companions, they also have several functions-they enhance our beauty (the hair), they are a mean of sexual attraction (body-hairs spread the pheromones in the sweat), they protect our body as well (from the dust, m UV rays, sweat, or bacteria, for instance) and they are an instrument of thermoregulation.
Mr. Hair is divided into two parts: the terminal hair, that’s what we can see, and the root which is deep in our dermis, protected in the so called hair follicle. At the end of the root the bulb and the papilla with vessels take the nutrients to the body hair so that it can grow strong! The papilla is full of blood vessels, that’s the reason removing hairs is painful!
A sebaceous gland comes with each hair to lubricate it, along with an erector muscle which is activated unconsciously when we feel cold or we experience strong emotions, the horrifying phenomenon, the well-know goose bumps.
The body hairs we have scattered all over the body, are not always the same: newborns have very fine hairs, the lanugo, which disappears in a short while. Fleece hairs grow when we are children and come along with us long life; during the puberty, some fleece hairs turn into terminal hairs which are thicker, longer, and colored (for instance hair, eyelashes, eyebrows, leg and arm hairs, pubic hairs, beard, mustache)
The hair growth depends on several factors: the hormones play an important role. Female ones, the estrogens, hinder it; on the other hand, the androgens, the male hormones, stimulate it.
Men and women have different approaches to body hair excess: the former doesn’t care a lot about it, the latter consider it as a very annoying problem to sort out.
We will look into the issue and we will speak about the way to get rid of them.