shortterm-deep/surface

Surface methods — shaving with a blade, shaving with a foil or rotary electric razor, and chemical depilation with thioglycolate or barium-sulfide creams — all share a single mechanical idea: interrupt the hair at or just below the skin line and leave the…

Barium-sulfide depilatories are the older chemistry that preceded the modern thioglycolate generation and never quite went away. Their continued presence on US and global shelves in 2026 — SoftSheen-Carson's Magic Shaving Powder is the archetype — is not…

Chemical depilatory creams dissolve the hair shaft at or just below the skin surface using alkaline reducing chemistry. They are the oldest continuously-used non-blade hair removal method — barium-sulfide formulations precede the modern thioglycolate…

Shaving is the reference method for hair removal against which every other short-term technique is implicitly compared. It is also the most misunderstood. Most of what lay writing says about shaving — that it thickens regrowth, that it darkens the hair,…

This chapter is the engineering-and-materials companion to shaving.md. The reason multi-blade razors cause pseudofolliculitis at higher rates than single-blade ones, the reason electric razors leave a visibly longer stub, the reason skin-guard designs…

Pseudofolliculitis barbae — "razor bumps" — is the single largest reason shaving fails as a hair-removal method in the populations where it fails. It affects an estimated 45-85% of Black men, smaller fractions of tightly-curled-hair South Asian, Middle…