Waxing and Retinoids

Some people ask if they can wax their eyebrows or their upper lip when they are regularly using exfoliants like retinoids or glycolics, but unfortunately most people find out the hard way because they get burned from waxing. The wax actually pulls off the upper layer of skin and it causes the area to become very raw and moist and it oozes and crusts just the way your knee did when you scraped it when you were a kid. A couple of days of a topical antibiotic will make it go away. However, the way to avoid this is to tell your waxer that you’re using exfoliants regularly, so they can adjust the wax in order to not cause that type of a burn. The reason that it happens is because your exfoliants remove the dead cells on the surface of the skin. Normally, the wax grabs onto those dead cells and pulls them off harmlessly during waxing, but if those dead cells aren’t there because you’ve been dutifully using you’re exfoliant, then the wax grabs the live cells and that’s why you get the burn. So, in order to prevent this, in addition to telling your waxer that you’re exfoliating regularly, it’s probably a good idea to not exfoliate for two or three days before you get waxed.