Re: upper lip skin darkening due to threading...HELP!

> i used to get my upper lip and chin threaded once a week
> because i have dark facial hair and very pale skin so it
> is very easily visible when it grows back, and it used
> to be around around 2-3 millimetres. But then i started
> doing it myself (thinking it would save me time, and
> money, in the long run, boy was i wrong!) and so i did
> it every3-4 days when the hairs were slightly shorter,
> but still visible.

That makes things a lot clearer, because if you had visible hair growth after 3-4 days you have a lot of hair growth. It's not the same hairs that are growing back in after a matter of days -- that takes weeks if they've been removed from the root (a few of the threaded ones may just have broken off, but most will have been pulled from the roots.)

> Its difficult to say how many hairs i threaded because
> i hvae many on my upper lip and chin, but the majority
> of them were coarse...however i have noticed that some
> of them have become thinner again since i have gone back
> to get it professionally threaded. Also when i was doing
> it myself the hair growth increased quite a bit...but i
> think it has calmed down a bit since

Again, I think that's a significant indication of the situation. If they're coarse, and if there's a significant number of them, the growth is hormonally fuelled. I suspect that the growth may have appeared to get heavier when you were doing the threading yourself because you may have been breaking many of them off, rather than getting them out from the root, so come a few days later, the bristles would be back above the surface. A professional would be getting the hair out by the root and the same hair wouldn't come back for weeks.

> ...its so difficult to judge my facial hair growth because
> i find it is so volatile, ie. sometimes it grows in strong
> spurts of really coarse hai and other times it seems to slow
> down a bit and become a bit finer...strange!

Quite apart from the fact that the proportion of hairs removed from the root rather than broken off may vary from time to time, growth of hormonally-fuelled hair does vary with the menstrual cycle -- which you notice much more when you've got a rapid heavy growth. When your estrogen levels are high, the growth will slow right down. When your estrogen levels are lower and your testosterone levels higher, growth increases.

> yes u are right, all forms of hair removal will effect the
> skin somewhat, its just that i know other people who get
> their upper lip threaded (friends, cousins), and they dont
> seem to be affected in the same way.

Everyone's different. Especially in their hormonal makeup.

> I am using vitamin E cream on the area now and the darkness
> in the skin seems to have lessened just a tiny bit, maybe it
> will go with time....who knows!

Well, I guess it certainly can't hurt, and I hope it works well for you. It may be that having gone back to the professional threading as made a difference. I would be very cautious about it, though, because over time it distorts the roots of the hair so that adjacent hairs grow at all sorts of different angles. It gets specially obvious on the upper lip and makes the moustache growth look very untidy and obvious as it comes back in.

For myself, the difficult thing was admitting to myself that I had a moustache and that the rate it was growing at was very definitely in the male range. Once I'd admitted that to myself, shaving was the best answer for me. If my moustache had reappeared only once a month, my decision might have been different (though now I'd take the line that I'd prefer to shave even that). Hair growth that comes back sufficiently to require shaving twice a week or more frequently is into the male range and shaving with a top quality men's electric razor is really a trouble-free way of removing it with the advantage of no side-effects.