Oh god I feel sick, seriously, … this is worse than the TMI thread … WHY do I open threads like this, WHY??
Reuben, you have no excuses. You’ve been here long enough to know the rules. It is MANDATORY to report mutant zits, long hairs and other fascinating emanations, excretions, and important happenings so that we can mull over them and offer helpful advice. Besides, Coldfire is just so cute when he shoots off irritated replies.
Actually, I don’t have a beard. Well, except when I don’t shave for a day or two, but that doesn’t count. What I meant to say was: I have a fairly heavy beard growth.
I have one or two of those thick, wiry hairs growing out of a scar on my chin. They’ve got the same texture as male facial hair. They’re the reason I own three pairs of tweezers.
Robin
I just had another little bump on my chin.
Squeezed out a little zit butter, leaving a single white hair in the middle of the evacuated pore. I take a tweezers to pluck it…it won’t budge, no matter how hard I pull ( tweezer tips keep on slipping off).
I need a more robust tool…needle nose pliers.
I grab ahold of it and give it a yank.
YEEOOOWWWW!!!
I pull a hard irregularly shaped lump (and overlying skin) out of my chin. This lump is white, hard, has multiple roots growing in all directions…it kinda looks like a Mandelbrot Set. I now have a crater 1/8 of an inch on my chin.
This lump wasn’t even follicle shaped…instead of growing up through the skin, it decided to grow EVRYWHERE simultaneously.
Well then I guess I won’t have lots to report.
smirks
And somewhere, a lonely thread that the teeming millions would actually like an update on is crying out, unloved.
Ooooooooooooo! A beard in Kricket’s mind! You hairy-minded cutie! 
Just the opposite for me, I always pictured Coldfire as uplinked from his mountain cabin, wandering the hills in a bushy grey beard, flannel, tin pots and pans clinking on the saddle of his old mule as it faithfully follows him about. I envision him cackling every time “Heeee he heh, moved another post there, old Number 7, what you think about dem apples?” His mule faithfully braying in agreement…
Enola, what’d you do with it? I hope you kept it and took pictures. Because that’s really (REALLY) disturbing.
Yay!!!
I love removing ingrown hairs. My favorites are the ones that are swollen but not red; just a normal-looking lump of skin. Sometimes, you can see a slight dark line where the hair is stuck. Giving these a squeeze results in a small pile of zit butter, which almost always brings the hair (or clump of hair) along with it. If you cultivate the hair-lump long enough, you can get some pretty good distance with the zit butter when you squeeze. (This is not to be confused with a sebaceous cyst, which contains copious amounts of zit butter but no hair.)
Ingrown hair bumps that are pinkish or red tend to harbor pus instead of zit butter. With this type of ingrown hair, I slit the top of the lump with a sterilized pin to drain the pus, then remove the hairs with tweezers. Sometimes these infected lumps will contain hard bits at the base of the hair(s).
sniffles, wipes away a stray tear
This post is a thing of Beauty. I’m deeply touched.
And jealous.
I second this… I find that I am freakishly fascinated by gross stuff like this. :eek:
That…is insane. I’m aghast. My mind is reeling from the visual.
I’ve got a nice little collection - 2 coarse dark baddies, one white coarse fella, a selection of wispy dark ones. I also own three pairs of tweezers and have considered purchasing them in bulk so I can have one wherever I am.
I once had a very wispy - but long, like over an inch - dark hair that came in just above my jawline under my ear. By the time I finally noticed it with the proper lighting and angle, it was huge. I was pissed at my friend at the time for never telling me it was there. I couldn’t believe I walked around for months with that thing.
I love it too - I give them a gentle flick with the point of a pin, and you immediately see the red swelling relax.
Anyway - to reduce razor bumps (I’ve yet to avoid it completely), you need to shave less close. Particularly towards the neck, it’s tempting to stretch the skin as you shave. This makes the hairs project further than they normally do, so cutting them off at this level means they sink back below the skin surface. In rare cases, they start growing into the skin, and cause a true ingrowing hair like in the OP (My record is about 15mm). Failing that, the sharp end to the cut hair, plus possible bacteria from the blade, can trigger the same immune-system reaction that creates acne from blocked pores, resulting in the red bumps.
Apparently, the only sure way to avoid it is with a cut-throat razor, because that allows the hairs to be sliced at the angle they’re growing out of the skin, leaving them to move freely. But I’ve yet to try that myself
:eek:
I get the mutant bristles on my jawline occasionally; sometimes they are tough and wiry and hard to pull out, other times they just slip out and are thick, but very soft and waxy, almost like a pieces of PVC wire insulation.
One time I got a really nasty ingrown hair on my neck under my chin; it made a big, hard lump that stuck around for weeks and was very painful. One day, it seemed to be coming to a head, so I gave it a little squeeze and all sorts of coloured stuff came out, but there was still a hard lump; I dug around a bit with some fine tweezers and eventually pulled out what looked like a little curved black claw - it was about half a centimetre long, glossy and bone-hard.
Has anyone else noticed a lack of women chiming in with bikini-line stories?
This is all TMI and all…but I can’t be the only one on these boards who’s had the unfortunate opportunity to dig ingrown hairs out of my…ahem…lower region with tweezers and a needle after getting much to happy with a razor on the boys.
BTW, a new rule that I live by is: Just trim the boys…never shave your balls baby smooth. Amen. Hallelujah!
-K
(sorry 'bout that info)
I should tell you about the time my supposedly-self-dissolving vasectomy stictches didn’t dissolve, then the skin grew around them and I had to dig 'em out - maybe in a different thread.
I’m thinking we’re almost bretheren here Mangetout. It was absolutely painful, not to mention the cool Cirque De Soliel contortions I got to make whilst needling my family jewels. 