Ingrown Hairs

People apologize to me for ingrown hairs constantly, as if it’s something they did wrong. It almost never is. I can usually tell within a minute of looking at someone’s skin exactly what’s driving it, and it’s almost always their hair’s natural growth pattern — not anything they failed to do. I’ve treated women who carried tweezers in every purse they owned because they never knew when they’d feel another ingrown hair.

This is a growth pattern, not a hygiene failure.

Some of the cleanest, most careful women I’ve ever treated had the worst ingrown hairs.

An ingrown hair happens when a hair curls back or grows sideways into the skin instead of rising up and out cleanly, causing a small, sometimes inflamed bump. It’s extremely common anywhere hair is regularly removed, and especially common in curly and coily hair textures.

Why This Actually Happens: the Shape of the Follicle

The reason curly and coily hair is so much more prone to this comes down to the actual shape of the hair follicle, not anything about how the hair is being removed. Straight hair tends to grow from a follicle that lets the hair shaft grow fairly straight up and out. Curly and coily hair grows from a follicle that’s more curved beneath the skin, so the hair shaft itself curves as it grows — both below the skin and once it’s above it. That curve is exactly why the hair is more likely to double back and re-enter the skin before it fully clears the surface, or to curl back on itself just beneath it once it’s been cut short. The body treats that embedded hair as a foreign object and mounts an inflammatory response around it, which is the bump, redness, and sometimes pus you’re actually seeing.

When hair is cut, shaved, waxed, or tweezed, new growth can re-enter the skin before breaking through the surface cleanly — especially if the hair naturally grows at a curve or angle, which is exactly what curly and coily hair does. Straight hair can develop ingrown hairs too, particularly in waxed or tweezed areas, but I see it far more often, and far more severely, in curly and coily textures, often alongside related patterns like Pseudofolliculitis Barbae (PFB) and the dark-mark discoloration that comes with both.

Why Laser Actually Solves This, When Exfoliation Alone Doesn’t

Exfoliation and correct removal technique manage the symptom — they help an individual hair release and clear the surface more easily. Neither one changes the shape of the follicle producing the next hair, which is why the ingrown hairs keep returning no matter how careful the routine gets. Laser hair removal is the most durable fix I have precisely because it addresses the actual source: it disables the follicle itself, using the same laser mechanism described in depth on the Laser Hair Removal page, so there’s simply less hair left to curl back into the skin in the first place. Gentle chemical exfoliation with mandelic acid between sessions helps existing hairs release properly instead of curling back under while that reduction is happening. And once you’ve started a laser course, shaving is the only removal method I want you using between sessions: a sharp, clean razor, shaving with the grain, and never pulling the skin taut all genuinely reduce new ingrown hairs while the laser does its work — the same principle explained on the Pseudofolliculitis Barbae (PFB) page. Waxing, threading, and tweezing pull hair out by the root, which works against what the laser is doing and can irritate the follicle further, so I ask clients to set those aside completely once treatment begins.

What Makes It Worse

Physical scrubs with large, harsh particles tend to irritate sites that are already inflamed. Continuing the same removal method indefinitely, without addressing the hair growth underneath it, just keeps the same cycle running. And picking or squeezing, even carefully, raises infection and scarring risk more than it ever helps — it doesn’t change the follicle’s curve, so it solves nothing beyond the single hair you just traumatized.

What Getting Better Actually Looks Like

Laser hair removal typically shows a real, noticeable drop in new ingrown hairs within the first few sessions, well before the full course is complete. Most clients tell me the first thing they notice isn’t that every hair is gone — it’s that they’re finally waking up without a new painful bump every morning. Existing dark marks from years of ingrown hairs take longer to fade than new ones take to stop forming, and I treat those as a separate, parallel process — usually addressed with mandelic acid alongside the laser course — rather than expecting one treatment to solve both at once.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will laser make my ingrown hairs worse before they get better? No — unlike waxing or tweezing, laser doesn’t pull the hair from the root or disturb the follicle mechanically, so it doesn’t trigger a fresh round the way those methods can.

Can I still get ingrown hairs after finishing a full laser course? Occasionally, from any hair the laser didn’t fully disable, but far less often and far less severely, since there’s simply less hair present to become ingrown.

Is this the same thing as PFB? Related, but not identical — Pseudofolliculitis Barbae (PFB) is specifically the shaving-related version of this same curved-follicle mechanism, concentrated in the beard, neck, and bikini area.

When to Get It Looked At

If an area becomes significantly painful, swollen, or shows real signs of infection, get medical evaluation rather than continuing home treatment. And if ingrown hairs are severe and widespread, not responding to anything you’ve tried, it may be part of a larger pattern like Pseudofolliculitis Barbae (PFB) or Hidradenitis Suppurativa (HS) worth a dedicated evaluation rather than managing it piecemeal.

I also want to say something here as my own opinion, not a medical fact: if you’re Black or dark-skinned, or you have curly or coily hair, and this is your first ingrown hair anywhere on your body, I would not wait to start treating the hair itself. Because we can’t predict which ingrown hair may, in rare cases, become part of something more serious like Hidradenitis Suppurativa, I personally prefer treating the hair early rather than waiting — I’ve explained why I feel this strongly, in full, on that page.

Related Conditions and Treatments

Ingrown hairs frequently overlap with Pseudofolliculitis Barbae (PFB), Hidradenitis Suppurativa (HS), and Hyperpigmentation from the dark marks they leave behind. On the treatment side, see Laser Hair Removal and Mandelic Acid Peels.

I’ve watched women spend years managing this one bump at a time — tweezing, digging, covering a fresh mark with makeup — without ever being told the actual cause was their follicle shape, not their technique. Once you know that, the fix stops being about trying harder and starts being about treating the follicle itself. I’d like the chance to show you what that looks like.