Skin & Hair · Women Over 40

See this chin? This is what twenty years of plucking actually looks like.

A UK skin therapist on why chin hair after 40 keeps coming back worse, and the one thing that finally changed it for her clients.

A client's jawline, photographed in my treatment room and shared with her permission.

That is not a bad photograph and it is not bad luck. That is a jawline that has been fought, every single morning, for twenty years.

Look at the wires along the edge of it. Look at the small dark pinpoints underneath them. Those are not age spots. They are hairs that snapped off below the surface and never came out. The raised bumps by the corner of the mouth are ingrowns that have been dug at with a needle.

She did not get that chin from her genes. She got it two seconds at a time, with a pair of tweezers.

I have looked at somewhere north of a thousand chins. It is the same story, in the same order, nearly every time.

Tweezers in the car. Tweezers in the handbag. Tweezers in the drawer at work.

Checking in every mirror she passes. The visor at a red light. The loo at work. The black screen of her phone when it is switched off.

And there are more of them every year. Not the same number. More.

You already know the menopause did this

Soft fuzz one year, dark wire the next. Everybody has told you that part. Your GP told you that part, usually right before telling you there was not a lot to be done and had you thought about waxing.

It is true, as far as it goes. Oestrogen falls, the signal to the follicles on your face gets louder with far less to balance it, and the fuzz turns to wire.

But it is only half of it. And it is the half you can do nothing about, which is probably why it is the only half you were ever given.

Twenty minutes, most mornings, before anyone else is awake.

Here is the part nobody tells you

Every time you pull a hair out, the follicle does not experience it as grooming.

It experiences it as an attack.

So it does what anything alive does when it is attacked. It defends itself. It goes into defence mode and it rebuilds, and it rebuilds heavier: the next hair comes back thicker, and faster, and anchored deeper than the one you took.

The ones you fight the hardest come back the worst.

You can prove that on your own face in about five seconds, and I would like you to, because it is more convincing than anything I can write.

Find the hair you have been fighting the longest. The one you would pull out at a red light if you had to.

Now touch some fuzz you have never once touched. Your cheek, anywhere you have left alone.

One is wire. The other is exactly as soft as it was twenty years ago. Same face, same hormones, same menopause, same twenty years. The only thing that has ever been different between those two hairs is the tweezers.

So it is not bad genes. It is not just your hormones. It is the plucking itself that keeps arming it.

Which is why nothing you have tried has worked

Not because you did not try hard enough. You tried very hard. That was the problem.

Shaving cuts the wire off at its thickest point, so it is back by teatime and coarser for it.

Waxing tears at skin that is already thinning and has lost its bounce. That is where the redness, the skin lift and the ingrowns come from.

Laser hunts pigment. It finds the dark colour in a hair and burns down the shaft. Which means it cannot see a grey one, or a white one. It looks straight through them. That is a painful thing to discover a thousand pounds in, and I have had a lot of women discover it in my chair.

Every one of them removes the hair. Not one of them says a word to the root that is making the next one.

So the answer was never another way to remove it

The answer is something that weakens the follicle at the root, so what grows back comes in finer and lighter, until there is barely anything left to come back.

One ancient Egyptian herb does exactly that. It is called Cyperus Rotundus, it has been used on skin for thousands of years, and it has sat there being ignored the entire time, largely because nobody makes money from a woman who stops needing razors.

There is a catch, and it is the reason most women who tell me they have tried this got nowhere.

Almost everything you will find is the raw oil. Oil sits on the surface of your skin. The follicle is underneath it. So it is exactly the right plant in a form that physically cannot reach the place it needs to reach. It is not that it does not work. It never arrives.

You also cannot buy just any bottle. It has to be the right kind, sourced properly from Egypt.

There is one small UK brand bringing it over and putting it into a serum, called Velura Viareline. Theirs is a water-based formula, so it sinks into the follicle and works directly at the root, which is the entire difference between something that can do anything and something that cannot.

And because it works on the root rather than the colour, it does not care what shade the hair is. It works on any colour, including the greys and the whites that laser cannot even see.

The question I am asked before any other, and rightly: is it hormonal? No. It is topical. It works locally, at the follicle, where you put it. It does not enter your bloodstream. My clients on HRT ask me first, and so do my clients with PCOS.

What actually happens, honestly

The first fortnight, nothing. Genuinely nothing, and that is where most women give up.

Around week four the hairs start coming in finer. Less wire, more hair.

Once my clients are a couple of months in, the honest version is this: they have gone from plucking every single morning to barely once a week, and it keeps coming in finer from there.

I am not going to tell you a twenty-year-old chin becomes a girl's chin. Some of that old marking stays. But not hunting every morning is a different life, and that is the bit they actually talk about.

It is clinically tested, it is recommended by dermatologists across the country, and sixteen thousand women here in the UK have tried it and not gone back.

Chin up, in daylight, without thinking about it. That is the whole point of the exercise.

If you are done plucking

If you have tweezers in your car, and you have been at this for years, and it has only ever got worse, it is not you. You have been fighting it exactly the way you were told to, and the fighting is the thing that has been feeding it.

If you just want a smooth chin back, this is what I would try.

It is a one-off bottle, not one of those subscriptions that quietly bills you forever. And they give a 60-day money-back guarantee, so if the hair is not coming in finer, you get every penny back. That is more than my own industry has ever offered you, and considerably more than the laser clinic did.

They are running their biggest sale at the moment. If you can still see the link below, it means it is still in stock.

---

Individual results vary. Velura Viareline is a cosmetic topical serum and is not a medicine. It is intended to support finer, slower regrowth over time and is not a hair removal treatment. If you have a diagnosed hormonal condition, speak to your GP.