History of Shaving

Shaving is removing hair from the face or other body part with a razor. Some people do not shave the chin, this is called a goatee beard. Shaving is the most commonly used practice by the men in general for eliminating their facial hair and females for removing hair from their legs and underarm. The man with completely shaved beard is called clean-shaven man. It has been well known that both men and women often shave the unwanted hair from their face, chest, and abdominal area, on their legs, underarms as well as their pubic hair besides excess hair form any part of their body in general.

The head shaving is supposed to be more common within the male segment. The head shaving also greatly connected with certain religious beliefs, the armed forces and several involving sports such as swimming and some other extreme sports. The practice is also common in men with partial baldness. In some typical societies the head shaving practice is also common for humiliating or punishing somebody for executing the obedience to the authority. While in many societies it is considered as the disgrace around presence of noticeable hair on the beard in females and is strongly pressurized to eliminate it.

Before the razor was invented some humans were reported of eliminating their body hair with the help of a couple of shells for pulling them out. Then sometimes around 3000 years BC the copper tools were created followed by the razors made from the copper. Perhaps this is supposed to be the time when the notion of artistic approach for personal hygiene would have initiated. However, the Egyptian priests are believed to have perhaps attempted something like this even earlier.

Egyptians shaved their beards and heads which was a custom adopted by the Greeks and Romans about 330BC during the reign of alexander the great. Usually the shaving is done with the help of a straight razor better known as the safety razor ? manual shaving or wet shaving. As shaving spread through the world, men of unshaven societies became known as "barbarians" meaning the "unbarbered".

The practice of women shaving legs and underarms developed much later. Men scraped their hair away in early times man with native items such as stone, flint, clam shells and other sharpened materials. He later experimented with bronze, copper and iron razors. In more recent centuries he used the steel straight razor.

For hundreds of years razors maintained a knife-like design and needed to be sharpened by the owner or a barber with the aid of a honing stone or leather strop.

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