If you favor the clean look over facial hair, then shaving is probably the lengthiest part of your getting-ready routine. For something that takes so much effort to then ruin your look with splodgy red marks all over your money-maker seems as unfair as life can get.

Don’t panic, ditch the trimmer and go full-on Hagrid though. You can prevent ingrown hairs when shaving and the razor burn that goes with it – you just need to make a few adjustments in the way you prepare your skin, shave it and then look after it leading into your day.

What Are Ingrown Hairs?

You can get ingrown hairs anywhere on your body where hair sprouts from your skin, but especially those areas that you also shave regularly. An ingrown hair is caused by a hair follicle growing into the skin instead of up and out. It happens most often when you shave, which can irritate the skin.

“Ingrown hairs can occur by shaving against the direction the hair grows,” says Dr Aamer Khan, co-founder of the Harley Street Skin Clinic and author of Turn Back Time, “and with people prone to acne by the abnormal activity of the sebaceous glands associated with hair follicles.”

When shaving, the blade will slice the follicle at an uneven angle, leaving it with a sharper edge so that it can easily poke through your skin and grow back inwards, the irritation underneath your skin causing a red bump.

People with darker skin tones are also usually more prone to these ingrown hairs as their skin is thicker and the hair coarse and curly so it’s more inclined to curl back inwards anyway. Men with curly hair are 50 times more likely than those with straight hair to suffer from ingrown hairs.

Note that those little red bumps on your face (or elsewhere) could also be simple razor burn.

“Razor burn refers more generally to shaving irritation,” notes Dr. Kristina Vanoosthuyze, head of scientific comms at shaving brand Gillette, “describing the typical symptoms that can be felt after a bad shave from the skin feeling hot, itchy, burning or stinging to the skin looking red or having little nicks.