Why Don’t More Men Use Epilators? My Opinion & Why I Think This Will Change

Whether you're a women who's curious about why men don't epilate more often, or a man who's wondering to himself the same thing, again out of curiosity, I'm here to hopefully answer convincingly the question: Why don't more men use epilators?

The thing is, men will often cut body hair short, or even shave, wax, or laser it off entirely.

You should keep this in mind as I go through point by point in this article - men are not complete strangers to grooming insofar as hair removal goes. They just aren't.

Maybe a few decades ago, okay. But now?

"Manscaping" which is I guess a shortened way of saying "man landscaping" i.e. men grooming under their necks, whether reducing, shortening, or altogether removing hair with a buzzer, laser, waxing, shaving, etc. - that's a big trend these days.

Manscaping is not uncommon at all.

So why not epilators?

First I'll go into what the popular explanations for why men don't use epilators happens to be, then I'll dive into why I think this is the case (completely different, and to me makes a lot more sense).

Potential Explanations for Why Men Don’t Use Epilators More Often Than They Currently Do

Online, a lot of people seem to be using the same two "excuses" for why men don't use epilators as explanations for this phenomena.

I call them this because I think they're a load of rubbish.

I don't actually buy into either of these two explanations at all, I just thought I'd share them for the sake of covering all bases, and to sort of debunk them as I go through them.

These popular explanations for why men don't use epilators are the following...

How Others Explain Away Men Not Using Epilators Often

1. Epilating is not masculine.

This is crazy talk to me. I don't think men don't use epilators more because they think it's not masculine.

By that merit, shaving, waxing, buzzing, laser grooming of almost any kind, especially if it includes hair removal instead of merely hair shortening, would not be common amongst men, and these days it is.

Hair removal of many kinds is popular amongst men these days.

They do often groom their hair, or even try to completely remove it from certain parts of their body, going so far as to laser hair off sometimes.

So why on earth would epilating be seen as feminine? Maybe because it's something you do to yourself instead of merely walking into a clinic and having a woman do for you?

Maybe, but I think there's something exceptionally suss about the idea that men would think epilating is feminine while being happy to manscape and groom and remove hair in other ways.

I think there's got to be a better explanation for why men don't use epilators as often as women do, and I think it's not got to do with masculinity or femininity, personally.

Maybe it's true to an extent, but I don't think it explains enough of why they don't use epilators.

2. It's more painful for men to epilate than it is for women, so they don't epilate as much as women.

Men have coarser, thicker hair than women, and so of course epilating will be more painful for men than it is for women.

But waxing is also more painful for men than it is for women, and men still do it.

Again, this explanation may be true to an extent, but not much of an extent, because as I've stated in my article about epilating vs waxing, epilating may hurt more in the short run than waxing does, but in the long run waxing hurts way more than epilating, so I don't think it merely comes down to pain.

Men may not know this. They may think waxing is less painful than epilating is.

Maybe the fact that an epilator looks scary makes them automatically assume it will be super painful over time to epilate at face value (I mean it literally looks like a lawn mower for your hairs so I totally get this).

That being said, not only does it get much, much less painful than waxing after the first 2-3 times you do it, but there are ways (which I've outlined in this article here) to significantly reduce the amount of pain you have from epilating, starting from the very first time you epilate.

I'd recommend everyone using an epilator try these techniques out.

Why I Think Men Don’t Epilate More

Either way, these explanations just don't cut it for me.

They don't tell the whole story, and in my opinion, don't even tell the majority of the story.

Here's where I think the bulk of the explanation lies in explaining why not many men epilate.

3. Men just haven't been exposed to epilation all that much.

I may be wrong, but I feel like the reason men don't use epilators very often comes down to one really simple thing: they just haven't been exposed to epilation all that much.

Epilating is just another method of hair removal that exists, but to be frank, the reason most even bother to use a particular type of hair removal to even test out is likely because friends, family, "influencers" or people we follow on the internet, happen to be using a certain technique and then talk about it.

Basically, by word-of-mouth the knowledge of those hair removal techniques, tips, tricks, and our biases toward them (like how "easy" or convenient they are, how painful or painless, how nice aesthetically they are, etc.) begin to pass through a group of people and, if they are liked and recommended, tried and then used more.

Essentially, I think epilation just hasn't trickled down through male culture the same way things like waxing and laser have.

I think it may, in time, once a number of men start throwing caution to the wind and just giving epilating a go, those men may tell their other manscaping men how much better it is than the alternatives, and then it will probably blow up and become way more popular.

But right now, there just aren't enough men out there using epilators to even tell other men about how crazy good epilating is in comparison to the alternatives.

So it's essentially down to a few risk-takers, early-adopters, and trend-setters to start things up.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

And if my explanation is the correct one, it's probably just a matter of time before more men start using epilators, because it's only a matter of time before they discover how awesome epilation is as a form of hair removal.