How to Wax an Upper Lip

Video Transcript

"Today we're going to talk about how to wax an upper lip and demonstrate that for you. And to do that, you're going to need some specific tools. The tools that I use are a wooden spatula. I use a soft brush for application of a dusting powder, a piece of fabric specifically used for waxing. Again, if you don't have exactly the things that we use in the beauty, from the beauty supply store, you can substitute a couple things. You can use craft sticks or popsicle sticks for your spatula if you're doing this at home. You can use muslin fabric if you don't have access to a beauty supply store and you can cut those to fit the size that you're going to need. Obviously, a makeup brush that's clean and sterile will work fine for your dusting powder. And for dusting powder, if you don't have access to a supply store, you can actually use baby powder. That would work as well. We're going to use the soft wax today, so it is important that we use a dusting powder. You want to make sure that the area is clean, free of cosmetics, and what you do is you're going to start with applying the dusting powder to the area to be waxed. And today, we're going to put it on the upper lip. This is to prevent the skin from sticking to the wax, so when you remove the wax, you're not actually removing skin with it. You just want to remove hair today. After you've prepped the skin, the next step is you're going to to take your wooden spatula, and we're going to previously have tested this wax to make sure that you're not burning yourself, so you're going to want to put that on the back of your hand to test it. Remove it with a fabric strip, just like you would with waxing, but you want to do that prior to putting it on your face, because you can give yourself a burn, if you're not, you know, if you've got some wax that's too hot. But you're going to use a little bit of wax on your spatula, and you're going to apply this to the upper lip area to be waxed in the direction of the hair growth. So, you know, whoever's being waxed, you want to look at that and examine it prior to putting it on. I took a look at Cheryl's lip here and found what way it was actually growing, and I see that I needed to apply it in that direction. And when you're going to apply your fabric strip over the wax, you're going to use firm, gentle pressure, and you're going to smooth the strip of fabric onto the wax, and you want to make sure that there's a good connection between the wax, the skin, and the wax and the fabric. This is going to promote more of the wax and the hair coming off when you pull that strip off. When you remove the strip, the way that you want to do this is you're going to want to hold the skin taut, and you're going to actually pull the skin, pull the wax off of the skin in the opposite direction that we applied the wax. What this is going to do is going to enable you to pull the hair out from the follicle at the root, and if you pull it out in the same direction you actually would probably be leaving the hair in, and so you'd be a futile attempt. So we're going to go ahead and pull that off in a short, quick stroke at about a 45-degree angle. Now, in this case we had a little bit of excess hair, or excess wax, and what we did was we just folded our piece of cloth over, and we went ahead and went back in and just touched it to the wax firmly and pulled it off, and it comes right off. Now, what you want to do is then repeat that same process on the other side of the person's lip, and you're going to again place that wax in a smooth, fluid motion in the same direction as the hair growth. Ok. Once you have that spread on evenly, you're going to apply your muslin cloth or your fabric for waxing that you've picked up at the supply stock store, and you're going to smooth that on with the firm pressure of your finger or your thumb, in the direction of the hair growth. You want to make sure there's that good connection there. You're going to hold the skin taut, again pulling it off in a 45-degree angle. Anything residual, you would just remove by replacing that same strip in a clean spot on the skin. Sometimes, if you have a person who's very sensitive and it's painful, after pulling that strip off you may want to apply light pressure with your finger over the area that's been waxed. If you do it immediately after waxing that skin, it will really take the sting out of it, because it is not a very comfortable procedure. Now the next step is you're going to want to close the pores with some toner, because after waxing, remember, you're pulling the skin, you're pulling the hair right out of the follicle in the skin, so you're leaving a wide open gap there, and it's really not safe for that person to go out into the environment with that pore wide open. So you really want to close that with something botanical, something safe, not a good idea to put alcohol on it. Rubbing alcohol is not a toner. You want to really stick to something like witch hazel or just a good reputable toner from a botanical company. After doing that, the next process that you're going to want to do is also you're going to want to moisturize that skin with something very gentle. It's probably a good idea to stay away from things that have chemical fragrance in them after a procedure like this. You want to use something very light, but we just want to make sure that that skin, because we've made it angry, has some opportunity to calm down and it's sometimes helpful to use a product with tea tree oil in it. That will calm the swelling and redness. And that would be how you'd wax an upper lip."