The Risk-Free Way to De-Fuzz Your Face

If you’ve never had your face dermaplaned, you’re missing out. I wrote about my love for this skin-scraping-with-a-scalpel treatment (done by a trained esthetician) here. It’s noninvasive, relatively inexpensive, and a non-irritating way to slough away dead skin. It also removes peach fuzz from your face, enabling your makeup to go on like silk. My friend Jane just did it for the first time (followed by a Hydrafacial) at a dermatologist’s office here in Ann Arbor, and her skin looks gorgeous: glowy, smooth, poreless.

You can achieve similar results at home with a tool like DermaFlash, which I wrote about here. DIY dermaplaning does not go as deeply as the in-office version, and results only last about a week (whereas a professional dermaplaning treatment can last four to six weeks). However, because at-home planing is less intense, you can also do it more often—like weekly.

After I posted on the Dermaflash, several readers told me they got their own devices and love them. Several others, however, wrote and said they found the tool too intimidating and rather pricey (nearly $200) for something they weren’t sure they’d use regularly.  

So when the Flawless Facial Hair Remover crossed my desk recently, I had to take a closer look. A mere $20, this device looks like a tube of lipstick, but functions like a dainty electric raiser. You pop off the top (again, lipstick-esque), flip the on/off switch and hold the teensy rotating, wheel-like blade against your clean, dry skin, to sweep off fuzz and dead skin cells.  It’s ridiculously easy to use (as in, I could do it without a mirror and not nick myself). There is even a little light that goes on when the blade touches your skin, illuminating the area you’re targeting. The device is marketed as a hair removal product, but just like shaving, it takes off layers of dead skin too, revealing the fresh skin underneath. (This is one reason men’s skin seems to age fairly well. They’re essentially demaplaning every morning.)

Flawless recommends that you replace the rotating blade every sixty days—though the company also says you can use the device as often as daily, which seems excessive and obsessive to me. I’d opt for once a week and then you could probably replace your blade two to three times a year. If you are a germ-phone like me, you can also swab the head with a little alcohol after each use. The blades come in packs of four for $20 here. At the same link, you can watch a video that demonstrates how the devise is used. It’s a cheesy-infomercial-like clip, but it does give an accurate representation of how simple Flawless is to wield.

If you try this device, let me know. Like Jane, I suspect you'll wonder why you lived with peach fuzz for so long.