Why do Black women get dark marks from plucking and tweezing facial hair?

Answered by Eva Taub

Because plucking and tweezing tear the hair out by the root, and on Black skin that injury is answered with pigment. The follicle is traumatised, the skin inflames, and melanin-rich skin heals by making extra melanin at exactly that spot. That is post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, and it is why the dark marks sit precisely where the hairs were.

I have been removing facial hair for more than forty years, most of it on Black and melanin-rich skin. This is the single most common thing women come to me with, and almost every one of them believes she caused it by being careless. She did not.

What the tweezers actually do to Black skin

Melanin is your skin’s protective response to injury. It is meant to be helpful. When you pull a hair out by the root you create a small wound in the follicle and the tissue around it, and melanin-rich skin answers a wound the way it knows how — by producing more pigment there.

On lighter skin the same injury leaves a pink mark that fades in a fortnight. On Black skin it leaves a brown or grey-brown mark that can sit for months. Same injury. Different healing response. Nothing wrong with your skin.

Then the ingrown hairs make it worse

Coarse, curved facial hair often cannot break straight back out through the surface. It curls under and grows sideways, or the follicle closes over it. That trapped hair holds oil and bacteria, and the follicle becomes inflamed — folliculitis.

Every one of those bumps is another inflammatory event, and every inflammatory event on melanin-rich skin leaves another dark spot when it heals. So you end up with two problems stacked on the same square inch of chin: the marks from the plucking, and the marks from the ingrowns the plucking caused.

And then you do it again next week

This is the part that turns a temporary mark into a permanent-looking one.

Tweezing is temporary by definition — the hair comes back, usually within days. So you pluck the same follicle again. And again. Each time, before the previous injury has finished healing.

The pigment does not get a chance to clear. It layers. That is why the discoloration on a chin that has been tweezed for ten years is darker, deeper and far more stubborn than anything a single injury would produce, and why creams alone rarely shift it.

Why the creams have not worked

Because the cream is treating the mark while the tweezers keep making new ones. You cannot fade your way out of an injury you are still committing every week.

And some of what women reach for makes it worse. Scrubbing is more irritation. Bleaching creams, hydroquinone, anything with mercury in it — on this skin, aggressive treatment inflames, and inflammation is what produces the pigment in the first place. Fast and hot is how dark marks get darker.

How to actually get rid of the dark spots

Two things, and the order is not optional.

First, stop the trauma. That means stopping the plucking, tweezing, threading and waxing, and removing the hair by a method that does not re-injure the follicle every time. On dark hair and Black skin that is a long-pulse Nd:YAG laser — the wavelength that reaches the pigment in the hair without being absorbed by the melanin in the skin above it. Where the hair has gone white or grey, a laser cannot see it at all, and the answer is electrolysis, one follicle at a time.

Then treat the discoloration. Mandelic acid rather than anything harsh. The mandelic molecule is roughly twice the size of glycolic, so it works slowly and evenly instead of fast and hot — which is exactly why it is safe on melanin-rich skin.

In that order. Treat the marks while the hairs keep coming back and they simply refill.

What I tell women in the chair

Put the tweezers down today. Not next week, today. Every single pluck between now and your first treatment is another mark you will be asking me to fade later.

And do not shave it in a panic either, at least not with a dull blade and not dry. Shaving does not cause the pigment the way plucking does, but a bad shave on this skin causes plenty of its own.