Most people are familiar with waxing – the hair removal method that involves putting hot wax on your skin and pulling it off with a strip of material, causing all of your hair to pull off with it.
Waxing is often associated with pain. You’ve probably seen many comedic scenes in movies with people suffering just to have smooth and sexy skin.
Waxing can, indeed, be very painful. If you’ve been avoiding wax hair removal for that reason, you’ll be happy to know that there are now better alternatives, such as sugaring.
What are the benefits of sugaring? It’s a less painful and more natural way to remove hair that is as effective as waxing without many of the downsides.
If you’ve been wondering about what makes sugaring such a good choice, keep reading. We’re diving into the benefits of sugaring, how it works, and why you should try it.
What Is Sugaring?
Sugaring or sugar waxing is a method of hair removal that involves using a sugar mixture instead of a traditional wax.
During sugaring, your hair will get removed in a similar way to waxing – it will get pulled out at the root, rather than cut off as it would be from shaving.
But because of how different sugaring is from traditional waxing, it’s often much less painful and causes less irritation post-treatment.
Instead of wax, you’ll be using a paste made out of sugar. This paste will be applied to your skin wherever you want to remove hair, and a special strip will be used to remove it.
The whole process is similar to traditional waxing, but there are some key differences that make it a better option for many.
If you’d like to see the process in action, here’s a helpful tutorial from abetweene on YouTube.
Benefits Of Sugaring
Below are some of the great benefits of using sugaring to remove your hair. Most salons and spas that offer traditional waxing also offer sugaring as a service. And, if you decide you’d like to try it at home, you can do so by purchasing one of many sugaring kits – we love this one by Sugar Me Smooth.
No Risk Of Burning
With traditional waxing, you are supposed to use hot wax because heat allows it to melt to the right texture that hugs every single hair on your body.
Unfortunately, this often leads to pain and discomfort. Getting burned by hot wax is one of the most common injuries associated with traditional waxing.
Skin that has been burned can hurt for days. And it makes the hair removal process that much more painful!
With sugaring, you’ll never have to worry about getting burned again. The sugar paste that is used in sugaring doesn’t need to be hot. It has to be warmed up to body temperature, which is much more pleasant and easier to tolerate.
Without any burns, the hair removal process is automatically that much more comfortable.
All-Natural Ingredients
Another huge benefit of sugaring instead of waxing is the natural ingredients found in the sugar paste.
Many people are sensitive to the various chemicals that are often mixed into traditional wax. Sugaring uses pure sugar! It gets mixed with citrus juice which acts as a preservative and gives the paste a nice, fresh scent.
Most sugar pastes don’t use any other ingredients. It’s so clean, you can eat it! Of course, we don’t recommend that.
But for those who want to reduce their chemical exposure or are simply sensitive to chemicals used in wax, sugaring is the perfect hair removal solution.
Easy Clean-Up
Because of the simple ingredients used in sugaring, it’s a lot easier to clean up after this procedure than it is after traditional waxing!
If you’ve ever had a wax before, you know that after it’s over, there are often bits and pieces of wax stuck to your skin that didn’t get removed during the process.
These bits and pieces of wax can’t be washed off in the shower – wax isn’t water-soluble. So you’ll be stuck picking them off with your fingers, which results in pain and pinching. Considering your skin is already inflamed and irritated from the hair removal process, this can be incredibly frustrating and uncomfortable.
Well, with sugaring, you never have to worry about picking off little chunks of wax ever again. The sugar paste is water-soluble and easily comes off with some warm water and gentle soap.
Exfoliation Of Dead Skin Cells
Traditional waxing involves some exfoliation, meaning the wax sticks to your hair and your skin, and you’ll remove a bit of both during the process.
The unique thing about sugaring is that the sugar paste only sticks to hair and dead skin cells. Which means you still get the benefit of hair removal and exfoliation, but you won’t get any of your live skin cells pulled off from your skin.
This translates to way less pain and irritation and way more smooth, sexy, and healthy skin.
Less Pain During Hair Removal
You probably already figured out that sugaring is less painful than traditional waxing for a few reasons that we discussed (lower temperatures, easier to clean, etc), but there’s another reason that sugaring is less painful: the direction of hair removal.
With traditional waxing, the wax is applied in the direction of hair growth and removed in the opposite direction. This enables the wax to pull out more hairs. The downside is that there is more breakage and tearing around the hair follicles – ouch!
With sugaring, it’s the opposite. The sugar paste is applied against the hair and then the strip is removed along the growth of the hair. Less tearing means less pain.
More Sanitary
Sugaring is more sanitary than traditional waxing. This is because the sugar cannot be reused and is deposited onto the skin using a fresh glove.
With traditional waxing, a single spatula is often used to dispense the wax onto your skin. Although a good salon would sanitize the spatulas between clients, the wax itself can carry viruses and bacteria from one person to another.
Sugaring involves using gloved hands to dip into the paste and put it on the body. Using a fresh glove between each reach into the sugar paste prevents any transmission from person to person.
In addition, sugaring causes less irritation, which prevents post-treatment infections that can be caused by excessive scratching of the bumps, as is common with traditional wax treatments.
Use It Anywhere On Your Body
Sugaring is safe to use just about anywhere on the body where you have unwanted hair, including arms, legs, bikini area, underarms, eyebrows, and other areas of the face.
Are There Any Downsides To Sugaring?
Reading about the many benefits of sugaring can leave you thinking that it’s too good to be true. It’s less painful than waxing, it’s safe than waxing, and it’s made with all-natural ingredients.
It’s true that many people consider sugaring a better alternative to traditional waxing. But like any hair removal process, it has some risks that you should be aware of:
Bumps And Ingrown Hairs
Anytime you remove hair at its root, you risk developing bumps and ingrown hairs. This is because hair removed at the root takes time to rebuild. So while a new hair follicle is created, the skin grows over the area and new hair has to fight through the skin to get out.
Sometimes this leads to the hair coiling around itself instead of breaking through the skin. This often has the appearance of a bump and is referred to as an ingrown hair.
This can happen from traditional hair waxing as well as from sugaring.
The best way to avoid these bumps is to exfoliate your skin regularly, but only when it’s safe to do so after your skin has healed from the hair removal process.
Minor Irritation And Redness
Although it’s less painful than traditional waxing, don’t expect sugaring to be completely pain-free.
You’re still removing hair at the root, meaning it’s getting pulled out, which can cause some pain. You might also experience some irritation and redness for a day or two after the procedure.
Thankfully, your skin should heal pretty quickly after sugaring since sugaring causes minimal damage to the skin. Just make sure to treat your skin with a lot of kindness and avoid harsh chemicals or skincare products until the skin is fully healed.
Hair Will Grow Back
Just like traditional waxing, sugaring doesn’t remove hair permanently, and the hair does grow back after about 3 weeks.
The good news is that after several sugaring sessions the hair in that area becomes thinner and eventually goes away permanently.
This may take a lot of sessions, but it’s good to know there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Final Thoughts
There are many benefits to sugaring, and most people who have tried it prefer it to traditional waxing.
The main feature of sugaring, in our opinion, is that it’s such a natural product with no added chemicals, and yet it works so well!
We love that it doesn’t need to be heated up to scolding hot temperatures, that it exfoliates the dead skin cells without harming your healthy skin cells, and that it is generally less painful.
If you’ve never tried sugaring before, we hope we have convinced you to give it a try!
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