3 ways to smooth skin
Get the lowdown on hair removal and discover the simple way to feeling summer-ready
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Your support makes all the difference.As city temperatures soar, for many of us, ensuring our skin looks glowing and feels smooth shoots to the top of our beauty to-do list. With more smart, at-home hair removal options available than ever, we are increasingly eschewing expensive salon appointments in favour of getting the results we want ourselves with a method ideal for our budget and lifestyle.
To ensure your skin looks flawless for longer, preparation is key. Weekly body exfoliation will help slough off dry, dull skin cells to reveal fresher, more radiant skin that glows, while daily moisturising keeps the surface soft and supple. This is especially important on legs, which are prone to dryness as the skin here has fewer oil-producing glands. Tackle puffiness in hot spots such as the ankles with a gentle massage to help boost blood circulation and lymph drainage for a sleeker silhouette and increased comfort.
And whether you prefer a quick shave or are looking for longer-lasting results, finding a tool that suits you is key. Here are three of the most popular hair removal methods:
Shaving
For fast, fuss-free hair removal, shaving is the go-to option and being savvy about your tools and technique gives the smoothest results.
A few minutes soaking in the shower first allows hair to become softer and 60 per cent easier to cut. For a close, comfortable shave, preventing cuts and irritation, use a fresh blade, shaving against the direction of hair growth - in an upward direction on legs and multiple directions for underarms where hairs grow more randomly. Reduce the likelihood of irritation by using shave gel and a light touch, which both help the razor to glide.
Our pick: Gillette Venus Swirl (£11.99) features a water-activated serum strip to nourish skin as it creates glide, but also boasts individually flexible blades and a pivoting FlexiBall that allows the head to move with the body's contours, giving even tricky areas such as the knees and ankles a flawless finish. Or try the cute and compact Venus Snap (£9.99) for instant smoothness on the go.
Introducing epilating
For a longer-term option ideal for beach breaks, epilating devices offer four weeks of hair-free results – and, unlike waxing, you don’t have to wait for the hairs to grow back in between treatments. A quick and simple process, epilation gently plucks hairs as short as 0.5mm from the root with a series of tweezers.
For a more gentle experience, it’s a good idea to soak in the bath for a few minutes before epilation. It’s also best to exfoliate the area before you start as this helps to lift the hairs up and away from the skin so they can be captured more easily.
Our pick: if you or your daughter are new to epilation and you have reservations about the treatment, try the new Braun Silk-épil 5 Starter Kit (£79.99), which comes with a unique Beginner Cap that combines the Silk-epil 5 epilator with Gillette Venus razor technology. The epilator captures 60 per cent of hairs and the razor shaves the rest for a gentle introduction to epilation. After four sessions of weekly use, every hair will have been removed at the root once and you’ll be familiar with the epilating sensation and therefore confident to continue with the normal epilating head.
Discover IPL
For permanent results, IPL (Intense Pulsed Light) is the smart, long-term solution. Until recently, IPL has been limited to expensive salon appointments, but advances in at-home technology are now making it much more affordable.
IPL works by emitting pulses of light that target the melanin in hair follicles under the skin’s surface, transforming into heat that kills the hair and breaks the growth cycle. With repeated use, hair becomes weaker, finer and lighter, while re-growth slows down.
Most of these at-home IPL treatments should be used once a week and while you can’t wax or epilate between treatments (as these methods remove the root, and therefore the melanin), you can shave. However, it’s worth noting that because IPL works by differentiating between the colour of the hair root and the skin tone, it won’t work for everyone (ie if you have very light hair or very dark skin tones).
Our pick: it can be a challenge to find the setting that’s best suited to your skin tone, so we love the Braun Silk-expert 5 (£399.99), which delivers permanent visible hair removal in just in 12 weeks. It features intelligent SensoAdapt™ technology that continually reads and adapts to skin tone for optimum results. It also uses the fastest IPL technology available, flashing every 0.9-1.9 seconds so a leg treatment takes just eight minutes.
All products are available at amazon
For more information, go to uk.braun.com or follow @Braun_Beauty on Instagram