Learning how to tame your nose hair is something that you will become more concerned about when you age. The accumulation of testosterone will cause your inner nose follicles to push out nasty, long hairs that look as if they have a mind of their own. Have no fear, I will teach you how to trim down and get those hairs under control.
You may be wondering if trimming your nose is a good plan. I feel that it is, it will make your face look cleaner and healthier. I have noticed that if I am talking to someone that has unkempt nose hair, I will focus in on that mass of hair and I will totally ignore the conversation that I might be having with that person.
Genetically, we had the need for long nose hair to prevent bacteria from entering into our nasal passages. The veins in our nose drain into our brain, and we need to ensure that bacteria do not infest that gray matter.
Also, bacteria is blocked from entering into our lungs by the nose hairs.
Nevertheless, the caveman days are over. We no looker need huge crops of hair in our noses. The medical community is now able to deal with bacteria and other infections in more effective ways. In other words, trimming your nose hairs is not going to set you up for medical problems.
You need to develop a routine for nose hair trimmings. Sadly, when a man enters middle age, he will need to tend to inner nose trimmings more often. This growth of hair does not have to increase your level of daily stress, you can become a trimming master.
1. Nose Hair Trimmer: Do They Really Work?
If you have shaky hands and you are tired of cutting the inside of your nose with scissors, a dedicated nose trimmer is something that you should invest in. They are not that expensive and they are small and easy to handle because they are wireless. I recommend the heavy duty nose trimmer by ToiletTree (link to Amazon).
One thing that you need to realize is that you do not wish to remove all hairs that are in your nose. It is fine to leave the ones that are not visible to others. They do serve a purpose. They will prevent pollutants from entering into your lungs and throat.
Here are the steps to follow for trimming your nose hairs with a nose hair trimmer:
- Make sure that you clean out your nasal passages by blowing your nose beforehand. You need to remove as much of the mucus as possible in order to effectively trim your nose hairs.
- I actually splash water inside my nose before trimming the hairs. The water method is something that I had learned while practicing Karate. It is a great way to clean your nasal passages before sparring which aided breathing while wearing a mouthpiece. Nevertheless, dry out the inside of the nose using a Kleenex so that the hairs will not be flattened out by water droplets.
- Turn on the trimmer and then use it on the inside of the nose. Do not insert the trimmer too far up into the nose, just an inch is fine.
- Rub the trimmer along the inside of the nostril until the trimmer is no longer trimming hairs. When it has trimmed all of the hairs, it will not sound as loud.
- Now, trim the inside of the other nostril.
- The next step is to trim any stray hairs that are visible when observing your nose in the bathroom mirror. There is no need to tilt your head, just hold your head in its normal upright position.
- Next, use a Kleenex to remove any cut hairs that are still within your nostrils.
2. Manual Nose Hair Scissors: Are They Safe and Do They Work?
Nose trimmers are not as dangerous as they sound. Of course, if you are not careful, you could snip into the delicate skin that lines the inside of a nostril. Nevertheless, since the ends of nose hair scissors are rounded, you will not be able to poke into the skin with the ends of the scissors. I recommend the scissors by GorillaKilla (click to see current pricing on Amazon).
The method for trimming using scissors is slightly different from that of using a nose hair trimmer. You have to see the hairs that you are trimming in order to trim them. I guess that you could just blindly snip away on the inside of a nostril, but that would be time-consuming and stressful.
You need to use a more targeted approach.
Here are the steps to follow:
- First of all, splash some water into your nostrils. The easiest way to do this is to fill your cupped hands with water from your bathroom sink and throw the water up into your nostrils. Do not inhale while doing of course. You just want to dislodge mucus that is within your nose.
- Now blow your nose into a Kleenex. With another Kleenex, gently dry the interior of your nose.
- The next step is to tip your head slightly backward so that you can observe the inside of your nostrils in your bathroom mirror.
- Now trim the hairs that you can see while avoiding the delicate skin within your nostrils.
- Situate you head into its normal upright position. If you can see any hairs protruding from your nostrils, trim them down.
- Wipe the inside of your nostrils with a Kleenex to remove any fragments of hair that may still be there.
Waxing out the Nose Hairs
Another method for removing nose hairs is to wax them out. It might sound like a dangerous proposition, but if you buy a kit that is designed to wax the interior of the nose, you should be fine.
Waxing is going to remove the hairs to their roots, so you will not need to trim the nasal hairs for probably another 4 weeks. This is a big time-saving. I use a nose trimmer and I need to tidy up my nostrils a few times a week.
Nevertheless, there are some drawbacks. If you tend to develop ingrown hairs, removing the nasal hairs completely will create an environment whereby bacteria can easily enter into the empty hair follicles. In other words, avoid this method if you have had a problem with infections in your follicles and ingrown hairs.
Also, if you over-wax, you are going to burn the delicate internal nose skin. The redness and the itchiness is going to totally frustrate you for some hours. Make sure that you follow exactly the instructions on the packaging. Hot wax is not going to be able to decipher on its own the difference between skin cells and hair follicles.
If you have burnt the lining of the inside of your nose while waxing, you can get rid of some of the pain by adding warm water to clean towel and then pressing the towel at the entrance to each nostril for around 1 minute per nostril.
Tweezers – Plucking out those Nasty Nose Hairs
Plucking nose hair is very tricky and time-consuming, to say the least. You can only pull out one hair at a time. At first glance, it might look as if you only have a few nose hairs, but you could have dozens per nostril (at least I do).
You need to ensure that you have disinfected the points of the tweezers that will be doing to pulling. I would suggest that you hold a flame from a lighter for a few seconds to each one to kill any bacteria that might be present.
If you introduce bacteria to the entrance of a follicle, you are asking for trouble. The veins in the nose are quite close to your brain. You can be allowing germs that cause meningitis to enter into your body that could cause an inflammation of the brain or of the spinal cord.
If you have completely disinfected your tweezers, here are the steps to follow to tweeze away your nose hairs
- Blow your nose to provide clean access to the nose hairs.
- Insert the tweezers into the first nostril. Never insert the tweezers too far into the nose, one inch should be the absolute limit.
- Clamp onto a hair at its base without touching the skin. Pull quickly on the hair. Hopefully, it will come out on the first try.
- Repeat the process for the rest of the hairs that are visible while looking at your nose straight on in the bathroom mirror.
- Pluck the hairs out of both nostrils.
Congratulations, you have now adequately trimmed your nose hairs. I will now deal with various questions that you may that are related to how to trim your nose hairs.
Does Trimming Your Nose Hair Make it Grow Back Faster?
There is no scientific evidence that I could find that states that your nose hair trimming is going to cause the nose hairs to grow back super fast and thicker.
Nose hairs grow out of follicles and most of the follicles in the human being work the same way. They are signaled to push out hair by the body. What determines when and how this signal is delivered? Your genetics controls your hair growth.
By trimming hairs that are in the nose, you are not going to change your genetics. If your genes are predisposed to grow lots of hair in your nose, then that is what you will have to deal with. If you are the type of person that has super fine hair in the nose, then you will probably continue to grow thin hair in your nose.
There is something that will alter the growth rate and thickness of nose hairs. The build-up of testosterone in the male body is something that the medical community is now aware of. As a man ages, he might be producing less testosterone, but testosterone can accumulate in the body. This high level of built-up growth hormone will cause the typical aging male to grow lots of longish nose hairs and he will even start to sprout nasty ear hairs.
I also read that sometimes nose hair pluckers that are not careful will damage the follicles. A damaged nose hair follicle may not be able to produce and give birth to a hair. This might sound like a blessing, but actually, it is not. Remember that nose hair is there to block out foreign bacteria and other germs. It would be best to be careful if you are a plucker, try not to destroy the integrity of your follicles.
Why Some Doctors Say that you Should Never Pluck your Nose Hairs
Perhaps you are not a big fan of Dr. Oz. I never believe 100 percent of what experts tell me. I know that people can be mistaken no matter what training they had dealt with during their lifetime. Nevertheless, he does make a good point regarding the plucking of nose hair.
He stated once that it not a good idea. He does realize that many people do it. It is one of those scary and dangerous grooming techniques that some men like to use. Dr. Oz feels that plucking a hair from within the nose is asking for trouble. You are creating microscopic tears in the skin that might cause some slight bleeding.
I personally have never experienced bleeding from a follicle after plucking a hair, but I guess that is it possible. Plus, I have to admit that I have never inspected the plucked area under a microscope to see if there was evidence of bleeding.
So, even though I had listed plucking as an option to nose hair trimming, you need to be careful and to use it as a last resort.
Another practice is to do the nose hair yanking out routine using your fingers. This is totally a bad idea. Talk about a silly tactic. Any germs, bacteria, spores or other nasty elements could be on your fingers. Then to pluck using unclean fingers could introduce really bad critters like methicillin-resistant staph aureus into your bloodstream.
Can you Die from Plucking your Nose Hairs?
I hate to be the bearer of bad and bizarre news, but you could die from nose hair plucking. Of course, this a rare occurrence and you probably will survive if you were to pluck a few hairs from the inside of your nose. Nevertheless, if you are fixating constantly about your nose hairs, you might be plucking away monthly at them. They tend to have some new length to them after one month.
Here is what could possibly happen. There could be a small amount of bleeding at that back of a nose hair follicle after you have yanked out a hair. The skin inside your nose is very sensitive because it is full of nerves that send information to the brain about odors that your nostrils are encountering.
When you have a microscopic cut in the skin, bacteria could feed on the blood which could introduce deadly bacteria to the veins that connect to your brain.
In general, is not a good idea to pluck or to play around with the skin that forms a triangle from your nose down to the ends of your mouth. For instance, if you have a tiny pimple on your upper lip, do not pinch it with your fingers to pop it, you will break the skin which could allow germs to enter into your skin. That area of your face is close to the spiderweb-like network of veins that are close to your brain so you need to keep it void from germs in general.
Long Nose Hairs Are Most Disgusting Than Bad Breath
According to Esquire, women would rather talk to a guy with horrible versus a guy that has hair protruding from his nostrils. You need to keep your nose hairs trimmed back. Once you are middle-aged, you should be inspecting your nose hairs daily. A long nose hair could have been twisted in such a way one day that it was hidden from view. Nevertheless, the following day, untwisted, it could be very apparent to anyone that might be facing you.
Something that you need to keep in mind when trying to attract someone, make sure that any hair that is surfacing from an oracle in your body, should be trimmed back.
For instance, some men tend to have hair growing from their ears once they are in the fifties. If you are one of these men, you need to inspect your ears weekly by using a hand-held mirror in combination with a bathroom mirror. If you see hairs crawling out of your ear like tiny spiders, trim down just the entrance to each ear. Using a nose trimmer would work well for this trimming task.
Will Plucking my Nose Hair Affect my Sense of Smell?
If you pluck the hairs out of your nose, you are not going to ruin your sense of smell. The hairs have nothing to do with how well you sense odors. The hairs are there to protect your nasal passage and your throat from airborne bacteria, germs, and spores.
Your sense of smell is controlled by sensory neurons that are located high up in the back of your nose. There are actually thousands of these neurons. It does not matter if you had or had not trimmed your nose hairs, these neurons are still going to be able to transmit information to the brain.
Also, since it not advisable to trim high up into the nose, the probability of you accidentally trimming in some of these neurons is low. Above, I had suggested that you use a nose trimmer or specialized nose trimming scissors. These items are designed in such a way that cutting into the skin is next to impossible.
Nevertheless, I wanted to discuss waxing. Waxing is more evasive than simply trimming nose hairs. You are adding heated wax inside of your nose. There is more of chance that you will damage the skin cells within the nose with waxing. This skin damage could end up damaging neurons if the wax reached higher up into the nostrils.
Also, if you fail to remove all of the wax, you will be preventing the odors from reaching the neurons that analyze scents.
What is the Significance of Ear Hair?
There is a huge debate happening in the medical community regarding the purpose of ear hair. I could not find a lot of scientific data that outlined the exact reasoning for the hair growth that many older men experience within the ears.
There are two types of hair that can grow on the ear. The peach fuzz type of hair is something that we are usually born with. The hair type is called vellus hair. Babies have a lot of this type of hair on the ears and on the body in general. This hair helps to regulate body temperature.
The second type of hair that can grow on the outside of the hair and at the entry into the ear canal is called terminal hair. These hairs are much thicker and darker than the soft vellus hairs.
Some experts speculate that the terminal ear hairs work in conjunction with the wax that is within the ears to block out bacteria and germs. Also, I read an article by one scientist that states that the hairs help to break down the wax if there is too much of it within the ear canal.
In other words, there is no general consensus on the purpose of ear hair, especially the thicker and darker terminal hair.
Does Nose Hair Cause Sneezing?
Nose hair on its own is not going to cause sneezing. It actually can aid in reducing how often you sneeze. There are certain elements that can cause us to sneeze.
For instance, a lot of people will sneeze when confronted with the strong odor of perfume. I personally almost automatically will sneeze if a woman walks by me that has a huge cloud of perfume surrounding her. The sensation of needing to sneeze is even higher if I am trapped in an elevator with a perfumed woman.
The hair in your nose will prevent the tiny droplets of perfume from entering into your nose. So in this instance, a hairy nose is a good thing.
Here is a short list of other pollutants that can invade our noses and potential cause sneezing:
- pet dander
- dust mites
- pollen
- certain cleaning products
- fragrances from hand soap
- smoke
Can Nose Hair Shavings Enter into our Lungs?
There is almost no chance of the trimmed noses entering into your lungs. The nose hairs are very light and they will easily stick to the mucus that lines your nasal cavities. If they are able to into the throat area, your saliva will capture the trimmings and pull them into down into your esophagus and then into your acid ridden stomach.
If you are paranoid about having the tiny trimmed hairs remaining within your nose, I suggest that you blow your nose several times after trimming your nose hairs.
Also, after grooming the inside of your nose, you might want to press a damp kleenex onto the entrance of each nostril. The tiny hair cuttings will then stick to the kleenex.
How Fast Does Nose Hair Grow?
My personal experience with nose hair is that it will grow back quite quickly. Sometimes I need to trim the inside of my nose several times per week. This all depends on the level of testosterone that is currently in your body. Also, genetics plays a big role. If your grandpa had long hairs hanging out of his nostrils, there is a chance that you will end up the same way.
What is really strange about nose hair is that its growth coincides with a loss in head hair. It is as if the hair from your head enters back into its follicles, travels through your head and then exits through the follicles within your nose.
There are actual stages that hair growth follows, and these stages are followed by any type of hair on your body, included within the nostrils.
Here are the stages of hair growth:
- The first stage is the anagen stage. This the growth phase for a hair. This phase can last for years, especially on the head. The hair in the nose that is growing out of control for most middle-aged men, varying greatly the length of this stage. Nose hair growth happens because the growth phase for these follicles is totally off due to testosterone build-up in the body.
- The second stage is called catagen. This is when a hair stops growing. Just imagine if a nose hair were to grow to a length of a foot, it would actually interfere with your eating habits. You would be brushing aside nose hairs constantly. Thankfully most men trim their nose not allowing them to know when nose hairs have entered in the catagen phase.
- The final phase is the telogen stage. This is when a hair falls out. Nevertheless, there will be numerous surrounding follicles that will take over the job of creating nose hairs for aging men.
