Types of hair removal in the Stone Age and now 2018
How the fashion for smooth skin began, and how evolution has come to the creation of beauty gadgets for hair removal.
The war against body hair has been fought for a very long time, but why it was started is still unknown to anyone. At all times, girls have used the strangest devices that have helped them keep their bodies smooth. Wday.ru found out when epilation was invented and what tool all women in the world are happy with.
Archaeologists are sure that ancient people, 30 thousand years ago BC, were looking for ways to help their bodies be smooth. First of all, they used shell tweezers – first they were sharpened with a stone, then they took two shells and removed the hair with them. It was this process that was captured on the rock drawing, which scientists noticed during their research.
Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome
While the Egyptians were not the first to raise the issue of unwanted hair, they took it to a whole new level. For them, the absence of body hair was a salvation from an additional source of heat. As it is written in old paintings and captured in artifacts, they used several methods of epilation: tweezers made of bronze, copper or gold, as well as beeswax as a kind of shugaring.
And in ancient Rome, men already had barbers who shaved off facial hair with a sharp blade. But women had to use pumice stones, razors and tweezers.
In those days, it was fashionable to shave your face. Probably, looking at the picture of Queen Elizabeth, you can see that her eyebrows were shaved, because of this, her forehead seemed larger. But the girls didn’t stop there. At various times throughout the Middle Ages, women willingly shaved their heads to make it easier to fit wigs.
But on the body, the women hardly touched the hair, although Catherine de Medici, who became Queen of France in the 1500s, forbade her ladies to shave their pubic hair and even personally checked it for hair.
During this time, everyone was trying to create the perfect safety razor. The Englishman William Henson succeeded in this in 1847. He took an ordinary garden hoe as the basis of the razor – it is T-shaped in shape. This is exactly what we still use.
So, on December 3, 1901, Gillette files a U.S. patent for a flexible, double-edged, disposable blade. It was a real breakthrough. At first, they relied exclusively on men: they expanded their client base during the First World War, when they struck a deal with the US military.
It wasn’t until 1915 that manufacturers thought about women and introduced the first razor, called the Milady DeColletee. Since then, women’s razors began to evolve for the better. The razor heads became mobile and secure.
Milady DeColletee, 1915 год
In the 30s, the first electric epilators began to be tested. Due to the shortage of nylon and cotton during the war and post-war times, more and more hair removal products hit the market, as girls had to walk more often with bare legs.
In the 1950s, hair removal became publicly accepted. Depilatory creams, which were already produced then, irritated delicate skin, so women increasingly relied on razors and tweezers to remove hair in their armpits.
In the 60s, the first wax strips appeared and quickly became popular. The first experience with laser hair removal appeared in the mid-60s, but was quickly abandoned as it damaged the skin.
In the 70s and 80s, the issue of hair removal became incredibly popular in connection with the bikini fashion. It was then that epilators appeared in our modern understanding.
The girls really liked the first line of Lady Shaver beauty devices, and then the Braun company decided to start its production of electric epilators, which remove hair by the root using built-in rotating tweezers.
So, in 1988, Braun bought the French company Silk-épil and launched its epilator business. Braun has created a completely new epilator, thought out to the smallest detail – from color to ergonomic design – to meet the needs of women in the 80s.
Each time, the improvement of the gadget was accompanied by an increase in the efficiency of the epilators thanks to the use of optimized rollers and a large number of tweezers. The main focus was also on improving the comfort for women during epilation with massage elements, work in water and flexible heads that increase efficiency by adapting to body contours.
Today, Braun epilators feature fluid, streamlined organic shapes with custom elements – often in accent colors, highlighting their cosmetic aspects while conveying value and technical expertise.