Hair removal cream for faces apparently doesn't exist.

Male faces. In the US of A we celebrate father's day, and though I got my gifts a long time ago I have not been able to find the gift I wanted. You see, when a woman has so much as two centimeter non transparent hair by her lip she can get a rub on cream that makes it come off after a wash.

Why do men waste so much time shaving? My dad can never actually get the stubble off, it's embarrassing, and with his arm in a sling his shaving is bound to get even worse. I'll get him some facial hair removal cream I thought. Such a thing cannot be bought, woman at the store tells me.

I can get hair removal cream for the top of the male head, for the male back, for the male legs and torso. The spaces between the nose and lip, between the lip and neck, are apparently harder to remove hair from than the pubic area, if you're a man. Is this some macho law I was unaware of until June 2019? Shaving Is Science, and the top scientists agree: beard and mustache must only be shaved?

Depilatories work for women's facial hair because that hair is generally very thin and light. Men's facial hair is likely too thick for a depilatory to do its thing of dissolving the hair before it starts to irritate the skin (and also too dark; depilatories work better the thinner and lighter-colored the hair is), and hair removal products for men's body hair might be too strong for the delicate skin of the face.

The gap in cream-based hair removal products probably persists because of the value our culture places on the ritual of a man shaving his facial hair. Gillette has been doing this thing for a while where they mail out a free razor to young men after they sign up for the Selective Service, congratulating them on becoming men. (Or try to; there's plenty of accounts of young men who never receive one, and of people who aren't 18-year-old males, even some who have never signed up for the Selective Service because they're minors or they're female, accidentally receiving a razor.) A young man's first shave is still somewhat thought of as a rite of passage, even more than when he gets his first facial hair at all, young boys see their fathers shave and come to associate it with manhood, and the razor companies have probably done some advertising to further the notion. A man shaving his facial hair seems less about the hair itself and more about the action of choosing a particular masculine ideal. And I would guess depilatories for men's body hair don't carry this association because their results aren't anywhere near as visible to society as, well, what's on one's face.

That aside, I'm not even sure how one would go about marketing a facial hair depilatory for men in today's culture. But it's worth noting the first deodorants flopped on the market because people didn't want to admit they had body odor by purchasing deodorant, and I could see a similar kind of reaction to a men's facial hair depilatory ("why would I use that when I could just shave?"). Maybe the idea might come up with time. Not that that helps your father right now, but hope that helped explain it.

I think I get it now. I feel dumb for not considering the thickness of facial hair compared to scalp hair.

Yeah, these problems have very much been the bane of my existence.

Sorry for adding this so late, I just saw it. You can get shaveless hair removal creams for men's faces. Heck, I think most major drug stores carry them (Just check around the shaving creams and you will likely find them). Why don't most men use them? Obviously I can't speak for every guy, but I can say why I wouldn't use them. I use an old fashioned safety razor, a shaving cream that I have to lather up myself and a badger hair brush to apply it. I settled on this solution after more than two decades of messing around with electric razors and multiple bladed monstrosities. The former rarely got my neck clean enough to pass muster, the latter always left me with horrible, horrible razor burn. A decently heavy razor with a single blade, and a cream with no weird ingredients in it works well for me. Why mess with creams that will eat away my hair... but also possibly my face?

Actually, there is a foul-smelling cream called Nair that gets rid of body hair. There’s also a type of Nair cream that is designated specifically for facial hair.

This is such a random necro that I have to wonder what led you to it and how in the process you didn’t see how long ago the last post was.

I'm sorry, I just felt like listing a specific example of this product.