Braun Epilator Silk-epil 9 9-579, Facial Hair Removal for Women, Facial Cleansing Brush, Womens Shaver, Wet & Dry, Cordless and 7 extras

Men aren't the target audience for an Epilator, but here I am reviewing it anyway... As a bodybuilder, I spend most of the year hair-free. It is a long and tedious process to remove EVERYTHING from my toes to my neck. Shaving is quicker and painless, but grows back immediately as stubble. Epilation takes several hours total-time and hurts like hell, but won't regrow for weeks, even months. The longer you have been yanking them out by the roots, the finer and fewer they regrow.As a man, my bodyhair is typically thicker and more coarse than my female counterpart. After a couple months of regular use, you'll still see just a light fuzz coming back and you can skip doing this torture for a month or more. After 15 years of this, I have very little chest and pit hair at all, even after 3-4 months of growth. It may well and truly suck for the first few times, but you get desensitized to it. Or you end up killing off the nerve endings just as you are killing off the hair follicles. Either way, it gets more tolerable the more and longer you use this thing.I have been through 7 different epilators and 3 different brands. The Braun products have always been superior in every way. The 9 series is as good as it gets. The light is bright and helps you see the missed ones easily. It seems less painful than most of the others, is easy to hold onto and can reach into tight spaces like armpits and... um... ya. Watch out for areas of loose skin that can get sucked into the pinchers. You can have some bloody chewed up flesh in a hurry if you don't pull the skin tight as you go along. This is the first one I have had that was cordless and it is so nice not being tethered to an outlet.Battery is supposed to last 40 minutes on a 1 hour charge. I exceeded an hour on my first use and it didn't look like the light dimmed, or motor slowed at all. After 40 minutes of torture, you'll want to give it a rest and come back the next day anyway for another body part. Spend a week gradually working your way through your entire body, don't try to do it all at once unless you have a special affection for pain. I can reach every part except my back, which I have to have my wife step in for a little partnership torture. Oddly... it actually feels good on most of my back - like getting a thorough scratch and massage.Most of the accessories that come in the package are worthless (to me). I just use the most open head cover to hit as much territory as possible on each pass. My wife prefers the cover with the vibrating thingies, as she thinks that one hurts a little less. The most pain comes from when it yanks on a hair, but doesn't pull it out. Could be an extremely coarse one that stubbornly refuses to budge, so gets repeatedly yanked on over and over. Could be that you need to clean the tweezer head, or it is beginning to wear out and not grip as well. Could also be that your hair is too long and the tweezers keep grabbing it too far up instead of down toward the base. Hair that is about 1/8" to 1/4" long seems to work best. Full length hair doesn't yank very well, so you may want to pre-shave before starting this. Cut it off around 1/4", or shave completely and epilate when you start to see regrowth to that length.Hair grows in stages. In other words, not every hair grows at the same time. I suppose of they did, they would also all fall out at the same time too... Epilating weekly at first will hit them as the different staged follicles activate. Eventually after you hit every hair at least once, you'll clearly notice the regrowth slow way down and you can back off to every other week, once a month or every couple months.There is nothing you can do about the pain. It is gonna hurt till the hairs slow and/or stop regrowing. Get through small sections at a time and take a break. Come back and hit another section. Once you get through the first complete round, you'll have just the fresh ones that weren't in the first stage. Third time and you'll have fewer still. Yes, it gets better.

In nearly a year's time since I purchased this, I've been through it all with this little thing. I'm ghost-white with dark brown hair and thick skin from keratosis pilaris. Shaving does NOTHING. I can go through the god-awful shaving olympics and spend 90 minutes getting my legs beautiful in the morning only to have them disgusting and stubbly again by that night. I've tried Nair, I've tried Veet, I waxed, I had done everything. It's just all too expensive or too risky (sensitive skin) or just didn't work.So I saw promises that this would give me smooth legs and I eagerly went for it. I was especially drawn in by the promise of 3-4 weeks of smooth legs without having to do anything to maintain it. The pain is horrific the first time you do it. I did both upper and lower legs in full the first time, and was very disappointed. I think because of my KP, my skin was NOT smooth the way it is after I shave. And I had to maintain at least once a week. Still, I found it worth it for a long time because it's much quicker than shaving and even though it hurt, so does shaving for me. I lost weight and the skin on my upper legs became so loose that I'd give myself pinch hemorrhages on my inner thighs no matter how careful I was or how taut I pulled the skin, so I eventually stopped doing the upper legs and just did the lowers. I maintained my pits for a while too because man, it's nice not having 5 o'clock armpit shadow.And then came a point about 4 months ago where I was tired of using it. I didn't have smooth skin, I was tired of pain, and frankly I was only doing this for myself as I have a loving SO who doesn't give a flip whether my body has a bit of hair or doesn't. I decided to go back to just using my electric shaver every few days instead. Easier, painless, and gave me 70% of the results of the epilator. I didn't think I'd miss the extra 30% that much.Oh boy was I wrong. It only took two months or so before I was tired of having prickly stubbly legs every other day. Every time I looked at the dark hair roots stuck under my thick skin in follicles making my legs look terrible even after I'd shaved, I regretted ever stopping. I did one patch on my right leg and watched over a month's time as that hair grew back finer and slower than the rest, and I knew I had to start again. I knew how painful that first time would be, so I took a few weeks to gather my courage and went back at it. I combined it with my shaver so that the hairs were shorter (HIGHLY recommend this, it helps a lot) and did the job in sections over a few days. Now I'm back to beautiful legs. I haven't gathered the courage to start on my pits again; I remember how awful that was. It hurt for days. I think I may get them waxed once and then maintain with the epilator.Oh and as for facial hair, I never did stop doing my upper lip with this. There's just no justification for taking 45 minutes out of my day once every couple weeks to drive to a beauty shop and pay someone else $15 to wax my upper lip when I can spend 2 minutes doing it once a week at home with this. I originally got this because I was using a face cream with tretinoin so I couldn't wax even if I wanted to, and now it's just so much easier and more cost-effective that I can't go back to waxing my face. It hurts worse than any other area but it is also done in literally a minute, two if I drag it out being squeamish. I cannot tolerate having a mustache, so it's a must for me.I use this dry and don't really care to do it any other way. Exfoliating helps a lot with removing dead skin so you can expose more length on the hairs you need to grab. I usually take a shower, exfoliate, and then use it. A charge lasts me quite a long time, especially if I'm only doing touch-ups in between. This is the best hundred bucks I spent in the last year for sure. Highly recommend this if you have the pain tolerance for it.