Preparing for a wax

Most of what makes a wax easier happens before you arrive.

Hair length

About a quarter of an inch, which is roughly two to three weeks of growth. Shorter than that and the wax has nothing to grip, so we will be going over the same area repeatedly for a worse result. If you have shaved in the last fortnight, rebook.

Exfoliate, but not on the day

Two days before is ideal. It lifts trapped hairs and clears dead skin. On the day itself it leaves the skin sensitised before we have started.

Time it around your cycle

Avoid the few days before your period. You are considerably more sensitive then, and the same wax will hurt more than it needs to. If you have any flexibility, book for after rather than before.

Skip the caffeine

It genuinely makes everyone more sensitive.

Retinol and retinoids. You must tell us

This is the most overlooked thing in waxing and the one I most need you to be honest about. It is not a trick question and you will not be told off.

Retinoids thin and resurface the top layer of skin. Wax does not distinguish between hair and a compromised surface, so it lifts the skin along with the hair. I have waxed a brow many times over the years, seen that tell tale glossy patch appear immediately afterwards, and known straight away that the client had been using retinol. Within a few days that glossy area becomes a graze, and it does not look good, on a brow, exactly where you cannot hide it.

It will not cause long term damage in itself. But if your skin is prone to pigmentation, that injury can trigger pigmentation which is genuinely difficult to shift and takes far longer to treat than the wax saved you. That is the real risk, and it is why we ask.

The same applies to acids and any prescription cream you may not think of as skincare. If you are using any of it, tell us and we will advise how long to leave it.

Acne medication

You must not have any waxing while taking acne medication. This is not a judgement call or something we can work around. The skin is too fragile and the risk of tearing is real. That includes roaccutane, and for roaccutane specifically we cannot wax you until at least six months after you finish the course.

Realistic expectations, and why

Your hair grows in three cycles, not all at once. That means at the moment we wax you, some hairs are actively growing, some are resting, and some are already sitting ready under the skin. Those last ones can surface the day after your appointment, and it can feel like the wax did not work.

It did. We cannot remove a hair that has not come through yet. That is simply how your body works, and no salon can change it.

Once you get into a routine of waxing this balances out, because you start arriving with more of the hair in the same phase. And this is where it gets genuinely useful: a hair removed while it is in its active growth stage begins to weaken. At that point the follicle has a rich blood supply feeding it, and removing the hair damages the follicle, so less blood reaches it to build the next one. Over time that means finer, weaker regrowth.

This is why long term waxing thins hair, and it is also why sporadic waxing does not. Consistency is doing the work, not the individual appointment.

Afterwards

Keep the area clean, avoid heat, swimming and heavy sweating for twenty four hours, and start exfoliating again after a few days to prevent ingrown hairs. Book the next one at four to six weeks, while the growth is in the right phase.