Dealing With Facial Hair

Hormones often have the last word on how your skin behaves, regardless of your life stage. But that’s not to say their effects can’t be minimised. Liz Dwyer looks at what fluctuations dominate in your twenties and thirties, and how best to safeguard your skin from hormonal havoc.

Facial hair – why now?

According to Neelu White, Arnotts? resident skincare expert, ?Starting in your late twenties, oestrogen levels decline faster than testosterone. Because testosterone is an androgenic hormone, it increases masculine qualities, hence some women often experience facial hair growth around this time.? It may be just the odd strand spouting up along the jawline or little patches of growth, but what differentiates these from softer hairs along the lip line is the coarseness and resilience of their texture.

How to handle it

To tackle the odd rogue hair, regular tweezing is often your best form of attack, and it will eventually weaken the follicle too, making the hair less coarse. For more bristles, waxing and hair- removal creams work, but not for a very long period, and can often trigger skin sensitivities.

Religious application of?Inhibitif Advanced Hair-Free Face Serum, €24.99, above, can help. This highly concentrated serum targets the hair follicle directly and slows down the growth rate and density of unwanted hair. And unlike many other hair-restricting treatments, which use only one technology to target hair growth, this goes hell for leather on follicles, with multiple actives. It takes eight weeks to really take effect, however, so you need to keep up your usual facescaping regime ?til it kicks in, and ongoing use is required.

For a long-term solution, a course of IPL (intense pulsed light) laser treatment is your best plan of action, and new developments in laser technology mean it can now be used to permanently remove hair on all skin types and hair colours. Six sessions of one of the most advanced hair removal lasers, the Candela GentleMax Pro, costs approx €290, sensius.ie.