I’ve read the Wiki article on antihemorrahagic agents, where styptic pencils–made of a kind of alum–is discussed.
While vainly trying to rescue my face after a particularly idiotic shaving slip, I thought, as I ditched the styptic stick and went for the toilet paper and then to the towel, what is the maximum amount of blood that a styptic pencil can staunch (cause clogging) before death by exsanguination occurs? Should that be addressed as volume or blood pressure at the source wound?
Don’t women use styptic pencils? I’ve never seen any of my SOs use one (and barely know what they are). They shave their legs, and must slip, right? All of the women I’ve asked recently say they don’t know, because they wax.
Of done some dictionary searches, and “styptic” seems to be the straight-up adjective for “a thing made of alum.” If it truly is an adjective, does it appear in any other uses than just “styptic pencil”? Otherwise, that’s kind of a tautological and silly definition.
What dictionaries are you using? Styptic does not mean “made of alum,” it means “tending to halt bleeding by contracting the tissues or blood vessels; astringent”. I checked out the first ten dictionaries listed here, and all gave variants of this definition. Only one even even mentioned alum, as an example of a styptic substance.
I use styptic pencils, but rarely for cutting my legs shaving. When shaving legs a slip usually means (IME) a nice chunk of leg is missing which is too much for a styptic pencil to handle and just ends up making it sting while bleeding. Also in my experience shaving legs causes far fewer nicks and cuts than shaving faces. I believe it is because we mostly have straight lines to contend with and the skin is more taught than a face.
A styptic pencil does live on my vanity though and I have styptic powder in the medicine counter that I use on the animals occasionally when nail clipping goes awry.