I thought epilation would be a magic bullet. I can deal with the pain of epilating my body. But the problem is the hair grows back in patches and in other areas it takes longer! Am I supposed to shave until it all grow back in a uniform fashion or do I just press on epilate every other day when I spot any hair growth?

My legs and arm get these darn red bumbs on them when the hair attempts to grow back, and yes I got exfoliating gloves. But they may not be abrasive enough.

Does any hair retardation cream out there really work? If I have to laser my whole body, that's going to take years!

Please help if you have any ideas!

Are you on hormones? I epilate (just did legs and arms ouchie) yesterday and hate it! But being on hormones the hair seems to come back finer and lighter (to a point if I didn't epilate you couldn't really tell unless looking close). I didn't really experience the patchy part. I exfoliate and still get the red spots on lower legs and arms. It usually goes away in a day or so.

Before hormones I got that too. After epilating my legs, my upper legs would end up with permanent small red bumps and some of them would become almost acne-like as the hair came back, even if I exfoliated daily. After I started hormones, that stopped. I think the change in skin from hormones has an effect. Also much of the body hair (even on legs) has either stopped coming back altogether, or is much finer and lighter in color.

I don't really know if there is a way to stop it from happening, I may not have been exfoliating with the right scrub or sponge or whatever and like you said may have needed something more aggressive for my "male" skin.

I haven't bothered with my arms because with hormones that hair is likely to diminish a lot on it's own, and it was never all that thick in the first place.

I love my epilator, and will likely never go back to shaving my legs.

The small red bumps sound like a combination of deep roots and ingrowns.