Monday, July 30, 2012

Bravery - DIY Facial Waxing

Of course you're wondering why I don't just go to a beauty salon for facial waxing. I do go to a beautician, but I do makeup looks on a regular basis which involves painfully close up photography. Nobody wants to see untidy brows on a makeup look. It's actually a pet peeve of mine. There is nothing worse than having to look at someone else's stray hairs up that close.
I thought I'd give it a go myself at home, rather than having to pluck strays every other day.
This is actually my second attempt at this. The first time I used a Veet facial waxing kit, and the results were woeful. It just did not pull any hair off my face. It was worthless, please dodge.
This time I'm trying a Nads Kit. You don't have to warm this one up like the Veet one, it works at room temperature which saves time. You just apply it to the area with the wand applicator thingy and you're all set for the pain that will soon commence. For this review, I only did my eyebrows.

With the Veet kit, I spent a good hour trying over and over to get it to work. I reheated the wax a number of times and tried it at a few different temperatures, trying to find the right one. I don't know what the problem was exactly, the strips just didn't pull much hair off at all. Really not worth the money. I think it was about €10. The Nads one is slightly cheaper, between €9 and €10. I should really start keeping my receipts.


Treat your brows to some Nads!

What's contained: Instructions, cleansing wipes, wax, fabric strips

The steps involved in this are exactly what you'd expect:

1 - Cleanse the area with one of the provided wipes. Allow to dry completely.
2 - Twist the applicator thing until some wax starts to ooze out.
3 - Apply the wax in the direction of hair growth.
4 - Immediately apply a strip. Smooth in the same direction as before.

The wipes are really greasy feeling. You'd swear your face would never dry after using those wipes but it doesn't actually take long at all. Give it a couple of minutes to be on the safe side. The applicator takes a good few twists before any wax starts to come out. It's not really obvious when you've twisted enough either. When it starts, however, I'm not sure how you stop it. It oozes out quite slowly, so after using it I just stuffed the cap back on real quick so it didn't get everywhere.
The wax feels sticky when you apply it, as it probably should. You put the strip on right away. I much prefer these fabric strips to the paper ones that were included in the Veet kit. It just feels like they grip the wax better. You don't get that many strips though. If you were planning to use this kit for the full twenty-four treatments you'd have to get more from somewhere. You rip off the strip in the opposite direction of hair growth, and it hurts just as much as in the beauty salon. The wax residue washes off easily with warm water.
The whole process is actually a lot less scary than you'd think. You're quite unlikely to come out of this without eyebrows.



I know my eyebrows weren't that bad to begin with. They were worse than they look in the before shot though. You can save the picture and zoom in to see the results better. I just couldn't make the picture here any bigger. This is about one week of regrowth since I last plucked them. I let it go for this long for the purpose of this review. This is the point at which I feel I have to sort them out, and the point at which I'd deem it would take too much plucking, and consider going to the beauty salon. In the after picture there's some redness and minor swelling, but this is normal for me and is not a reaction to the product.
One thing is for sure, the Nads kit is MUCH better than the Veet kit. The preparation/application process is much quicker, and the results are far superior. I'm still not sure that I'm impressed though, since it doesn't seem to grab the length of hair it claims to. DIY wax kits just do not seem to remove very short hairs. The instructions say it will work on hair 2mm to 3mm in length, but this just isn't the case. 3mm at a push, maybe. The longer stray hairs I had, they came off with the wax, but they were easily 4mm long excluding roots. You also can't be extremely accurate with the applicator provided. 
For most women, it might be worth it to pick up one of these. For someone who has to tidy them up as frequently as I do - you're better off just plucking. I mean, you're going to have to do a fair bit of plucking anyway since you can't get too close with the applicator, and it doesn't work on the light fuzz between the eyebrows. 


I won't be buying this or any other home waxing kit again since they don't suit my needs, but by all means pick one up if you think you'll get use out of it. If you're a lady who shaves her brows completely off and draws them back on, certainly pick one up since the results will last much longer than shaving. If not, it's probably worth picking up anyway. Consider the math; one tube of this is almost equal in cost to one eyebrow wax at the beauty salon, and you get up to twenty-four treatments with this. Its use isn't limited to eyebrows either, it can be used on most facial hair. I'm not saying you'll never set foot in a beauty salon again, you'll have to go back for proper shaping now and again, but essentially you could be saving yourself a couple of hundred euro in visits. Definitely worth giving it some thought!

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