I understand that BJs are more likely to be given to those with neat manscapes. For this reason, and general aesthetic preference, I’ve been tending to my brambles for some time with varying methods and likewise varying degrees of success.
My best success came from electric clippers to get the rough out of the way and Nair to clean up the remainder. I’ve met with limited success on my scrotum as, being a wrinkly terrain, the electric clippers like to nab bits of my flesh. Nair seems to have trouble with untrimmed hairs though so my solutions so far leave by scrote and bunghole with some lingering strays.
Recently, I decided to just smother the whole everywhere with a thick spread of Nair, after removing the easy bits with electric clippers, and leaving the Nair on for its maximum recommended duration.
This did not work. Aside from the hair that still clings to all my nooks and crannies, I now have a yeast infection…
What is a body to do? Permanent laser treatment runs upward of three thousand dollars, I’m thinking there must be a halfway solution around here somewhere though.
Does the community have any solutions to recommend?
Okay, be aware that there’s going to be someone butt hurt about what I’m going to cover here. That someone might be you, OP, I dunno how attached you are to your concepts of things. Just be aware going in that I’m giving you the best answer I have, based on a combination of a career in personal care spanning two decades, a little over thirty years of eating pussy, having girls and women suck my dick, and having a gay best friend that I had many conversations about such things with. So I’m not pulling this out of my ass here.
The first thing you have to accept is that the whole shaved thing is a trend. The second is that it isn’t the best thing to do with your your genital health. The third is that it takes a lot less effort to shave than other forms of genital styling, but way more effort to keep yourself healthy as you shave.
See, that hair has a role to play. If you choose to get rid of it, you’re also choosing you get rid of its benefits, which includes a healthier, better balanced skin biome. Our bodies, every square centimeter of skin and hair, is covered in microbes. Bacteria, yeasts and fungi, virii, you can’t get rid of them entirely, and you don’t want to.
If you manage to kill off every microbe on your body, what happens is new ones come in. They’ll be kinds that aren’t what your skin is used to, they’ll have to compete with each other to establish a new balance, and the process of doing so is going to cause rashes and itching and other problems.
Yeast infections? That’s what happens when the yeast on your body go crazy because something changed that let them out-compete other microbes. That’s it. It isn’t an external infection you picked up somewhere (well, it can be, but usually isn’t). Jock itch is the same thing. So is bacterial vaginosis, which is for people that have vaginas, not penises, but it’s relevant here.
So, what does that mean in relation to pubic hair and the other hair nearby? Surface area, moisture levels, and air flow. Pubic hair helps keep your junk drier, it keeps things spread out so that there’s a better overall balance to the region, and when you get rid of it, it changes that balance. Also, the process of shaving, waxing, and using depilitory creams causes skin irritation, as well as possibly damaging the skin. Damaging the skin is not good.
All those microbes all over you? Most of them are no problem on you skin. But in your skin, they become pathogenic. You get infections. Yeah, you’ll sometimes get an infected hair follicle when everything is hairy, but that’s still less of a problem for your body than an infection inside the skin.
Now, none of that answers your main question, but it’s necessary background to understand why each method is a good or bad option.
The absolute best option is to not shave, but take better care of your pubic hair. No bullshit, if you ignore the trend aspect brought about by porn and the random whims of fashion (pubic and other body hair fashion changes over decades and centuries), what most people actually dislike about pubic hair is badly maintained pubic hair.
When your bush is scratchy, harsh, smells a lot (not necessarily bad, just strongly), and there’s a ton of loose hair, nobody wants to suck that dick. But, I promise you, except for people with fetishes and people with OCD or other related issues, a nice, clean bush is going to end up preferable over time.
That’s because nobody likes getting their face scrubbed raw by stubble, having to deal with dead skin and oils building up in crevices, or the increase in incidence of various infections. Depending on which studies you dig through, incidence of skin issues with shaved pubes is anywhere from twice to five times higher. That depends in exactly which infections are being covered by a given study as well.
If you wash your crotch regularly, with only gentle soaps like cetaphil, half the problems go away. Most soaps are way too harsh for your balls, pubic mound and taint. And you shouldn’t be using any soap on the penis itself, especially the head. You use water and you r hand, or a soft washcloth. You’ll keep all the microbes under control, not have dead skin left around, and any oils that are left will be the freshest oils. So your junk will smell fresh, but it will smell of flesh instead of soap.
Keep your pubes free of loose hair. Just finger combing when you’re in the bathroom is enough, and you should be doing a courtesy check on your junk before anyone sucks it anyway. So, knock the loose hair out, clean it up, and (if possible) take a warm washcloth to the area to handle any built up sweat and oil.
Your pubes will stay softer, which is pleasant thing to encounter. Enough so that when a partner has never had anyone following this advice before, they’ll be anywhere from pleasantly surprised all the way up to verbally complimentary.
Now, if you absolutely insist, trim it. Stretch out some pubes, get an eyeball of that length, and trim it down to half. That’s long enough to keep benefits, short enough to maintain easily, but not so short it gets bristly.
If you’re going to ignore all this and shave anyway, give an electric a try first. The kind with the microfoil with holes is better for pubes and balls in specific. You don’t want the shaver cutting the hair below the surface of the skin.
If that’s not acceptable, then you follow best shaving practices: shave after bathing, or in the shower. It softens hairs and keeps the skin looser (usually, balls can be stubborn that way), and you’ll not be scraping as much dead skin and bacteria into your freshly abraded skin. Shave with the direction of the hair growth, when there is a direction. Never, ever shave against the hair in your groin. It’s bad enough on the face, but the problems it tends to cause down below far outweigh being fractionally smoother. There’s a dozen tips and tricks for shaving in general, plus others for genitals, but it’s just as long as this comment to cover, and a lot of it needs to be shown rather than told, so there’s not much point in it without having the ability to at least speak in real time and exchange images and videos. Which, sorry, I ain’t up for that.
Don’t use nair, period. It’s too strong for the skin of the genitals and taint. Just don’t. You don’t want chemical burn on your sack, and it is a possibility.
Waxing is worse than shaving by dint of being a guaranteed way to open up the skin to pathogens. Yeah, usually the rest of your immune system kicks in, but when it doesn’t, helllllooooo genital cysts and abscesses as your body walls off the infection. Boils aplenty when the now irritated follicles get staph into them. Ingrown hairs aplenty! And yeah, sometimes the body gets used to the waxing, as it can with shaving. The problem with that is the skin usually adapts by thickening. And that’s not exactly what you want with the body’s most pleasurable skin, is it?
But, if you’re going to wax, at least go to a cosmetology place that also does aesthetician services and learn how to do it with the least possible damage to the skin. There’s techniques to it that aren’t intuitive at all. There’s products for it that you wouldn’t think of on your own.
Hell, if you can afford it, find a place that does it for men. It’s a difficult job even from the outside, doing it yourself is harder. Maybe ask a true bro to help, if cash is too tight for a pro. It ain’t exactly fun, but anyone willing to wax your taint for you is ride or die worthy.
So, again, it’s your body and your choice. That’s the best information I can give you to help decide what level of tradeoffs you’re willing to make between good genital health and hair presence/length. It’s always a trade-off, you always sacrifice some degree of genital health, no matter what kind of hair removal you do.
Edit: there are exceptions where the drawbacks can be worth it. However, if you have some medical condition that needs your hair gone, you’d be talking to your doctor, not me. There’s exceptions for patients where cleaning is so much more difficult with hair that shaving becomes the best option, but I kinda doubt you’d fail to mention anything like that, so no point but, if you (or anyone reading this far) do need that kind of care, I’ll try to help get you where you need to be, just be aware that it isn’t usually something you can do yourself if you’re in a condition where shaving would be the best choice in the first place.
In my experience pubes are only scratchy when you trim them. A fully natural bush is rather soft because the tips typically break and thus thin out instead of getting a cut end with sharp edges.
Personally I feel some form of body dysmorphia from my body hair, and since I have some issues with seborrheic dermatitis (I have to use some special expensive shampoo too) I kinda would have to keep it also off of my chest & armpits, because as soon as the hair comes back it flares up immediately there as well. Unfortunately I’m also extremely prone to ingrowns so shaving makes me look like I have some terrible skin disease - especially in areas where the hair grows more sideways (like below the elbows & knees), where the hair would just continue to grow sideways beneath the skin. lol
Thank you for your thorough examination of the subject! I really value this and the education I received here will certainly inform my choice of future grooming!
I am old enough to remember when shaving all over was a fetish thing. But having been smooth, woah I like it so much better. I got ingrown hairs more leaving it natural, and it was itchier, but my natural hair is quite coarse and curly.
The skin biome isn’t weak enough to be lost by cutting off the hair, though, right? I’ve shaved my underarms since forever ago and no problems there, and plenty of men are bald or shave their face.
Well, the biome is going to exist no matter what we do.
What happens is that the balance shifts. It’s like going from fresh water to brackish to salt. Different fish, fungi, bacteria, plants, etc are going to thrive more in one zone or another.
Having hair present does the same thing, though the body is going to have different balances in each area as well, just like a lake biome is different from a river.
Underarms, as a perfect example to compare with the groin, have different conditions. First, air flow accessibility based on clothing. The pits tend to have better air contact. They also tend to dry out faster, partially because of the air access, but also because of the way arms move. When you get a patient that has reduced arm mobility, you start running into some of the same issues groins deal with. It stays damper, so you get more activity from fungi in specific.
It’s the same when you go to the scalp or face. There’s less variation between shaved and unshaved, but there is a teeny, tiny difference there. And, again, that’s mostly due to the head having more air contact, thus changing which microbes are going to thrive and be dominant.
It’s all about balances. It doesn’t really matter much what’s dominant in an area as long as it does have competition. It’s just that the groin is better suited to the kinds of microbes that become a problem when that balance is thrown off, and those microbes are also going to have higher concentrations when the hair is gone, making it more likely they’ll get out of balance more often.
should I use regular hair conditioner on my pubic hair?
please tl:dr this research paper/essay for me. so shave with razors and soup? wax? electric shavers?
O.o Do you want research papers and essays? I’m tangentially aware of the skin microbiome (yay, how everything in microbiology is supposed to be related so we all are expected to know what the weird fucking colleagues are doing in those nasty skin crevices instead of clean[ish] brackish water systems that are where the real science happens) and the amount of information on the workings of all the little microbes on your beautiful holobiont is astonishing. Like, the difference between what people think they know about our mutualistic relationships with our symbionts and what is really known is massive. Imagine the difference between the grade school kid who knows we eat food for energy, and the undergrad learning about the Kreb cycle. It’s bigger than that! It’s more like the difference between the neonate on the breast and the senior undergrad studying the enzymes that facilitate the rearrangements of molecules in the Kreb cycle. The sheer amount of control that microbes in your gut and on your skin (and other places too) have on your body boggles the mind. Did you know the microbes in your gut can control your mind?
If you want some fun, do a quick search on your favorite database for the terms “allergen,” “cockroach,” and “dog.” Then go for “SCFA,” “immune system,” and “Firmicutes.” You can also use “Bacillota” instead of Firmicutes, because people want to be trendy. Go for a deep dive with “breast,” “microbiome,” “milk,” “gut,” and “bottle.”
TLDR is more like there’s not really a good way to get rid of your body hair.