I stopped shaving with electric razors years ago since they seemed to cause ingrown facial hairs. Not had one for years.
Or so I thought. Few weeks ago prodded a bump and with some dexterity extracted an ingrown hair about half an inch long. I felt like comedian Brian Regan, concerned he had a two inch hair on his chin he had managed to miss for what must have been years.
Extending this exciting topic to any unwanted hairs or skin esoterica, this is the place to discuss your pimples, pilonidals and parafolliculitides.
I have two of those invisible until OMG how did it get that long? hairs on my neck and one on my arm. I am also one of those ladies who can grow quite a bit of hair on my face. It is a plague that comes from my dad’s Slovenian forebearers and my cousins suffer it too. Aarrrgh!
I had a bump on my neck for a while, and wondered if it was a pimple or a blocked duct or… oh my gosh I pried out a loop of hair, and more… and it kept coming. A tightly wound tangle of beard hair. I kept pulling until it all came out, with some blood and pus… when I straightened it, it was about four inches’ worth!
That was almost fifty years ago, and it’s still one of my most vivid memories. And my most satisfying moment.
I had one similar to the OP’s that was not only long but remarkably thick*. Was shaving one morning and it was like mowing a nicely kept lawn then unexpectedly hitting a tree stump. The razor just stopped.
What puzzled me most was that it must have been growing there for ages (it can’t have suddenly grown overnight) but all of a sudden it went from me not even noticing it, to being like having a log in my face.
About 25 years ago I had a very sore, red raised bump on my nose that was there for weeks, getting worse and worse but refusing to come to a head.
It finally became so painful that it was stopping me sleeping so after sterilising tweezers and seeing a tiny head appearing I set about it.
As I dug in I noticed a little black dot in the centre and managed to get the tweezers on it and pulled it out, eventually. About an inch long and tightly curled. Turns out it was an internal nasal hair that had grown inwards and eventually right through the soft part of my nose.
No wonder it was bloody agony.
I’m curious what qualifies as an “ingrown hair” here. I’m not being deliberately obtuse; are those long, whispy, hard-to-notice “invisible” (as @carnut describes themn) ingrown hairs? They seem out-grown to me.
Anyway, I’ve had one that was likely three inches long, by my estimates.
Ingrown (the kind that causes a red bump and is painful)? I’ve had maybe fine in my life, never measured them.
Well It is still nice to know that it happened to someone else as well and that I’m not too much of a freak!
Was it really painfull for you too? I confess that in the run-up to the discovery of the hair I was struggling to comprehend how a mere spot could hurt quite so much.
No, no, not the breadth: the length! Four inches seems to be the record to break so far. I must pass, never went even close to two. But the details were disgusting, I can tell you, with squirting pus that reached the mirror and all.
As the proud owner of the 4" abomination, I’m willing to concede that grossness more than makes up for length.
By the way, an audiophile was admiring my 90s car with a long antenna. “You probably get better reception than those new ‘baby shark fins’ on the back roofs of SUVs.”
What does that have to do with this thread? He explained that “They take yards of antenna wire and cram it in there. I’ll bet it’s just a tangled mess of thin wire.”
And of course I thought of the most glorious moment of my early life…
A definite connection. Perhaps you should go view some of the Vietnamese zit-popping videos on YouTube. Several of them feature ingrown hairs. It does make me feel sad for teenage boys.
I do recall, one seriously ingrown hair I had on my thigh. Once I finally dug it out, I found it was three hairs. Ook. The hair itself never came back, but the pore caused me problems for years because it would plug up with keratin.