Frank from Gauteng writes:
I have hair on my stomach and chest and I want to get rid of it. A lot of my friends say I shouldn’t: It’ll just grow back, I’ll get spotty and stubbly, and, anyway, it’s part of being a man. But I hate it!

Aunty Emma Answers:
If you want to be smooth, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time, or money, shedding what nature’s imposed on you.

First of all, you could try shaving or use a depilatory cream. Each of these is painless, if tedious, though on stomach hair especially tend not to be entirely effective, particularly if your hair is dark, and the grow-back rate is rapid. Try one and see if it looks good. If it does, you could stick with it, building it in as part of your morning routine. But there are problems.

With shaving, there is a risk of developing spots, which further shaving will then exacerbate. This can be minimized by taking care to treat the shaved areas with moisturiser and/or an antiseptic cream, and by exfoliating on the days when you don’t shave. If the skin does become inflamed, you’re pretty much stuck with the stubble until the inflammation goes down.

Strip-waxing is painful but does produce smoother and longer lasting results. Again, there is a risk of developing spots and in-growing hair as the hair grows back. To help minimise this, it is important to exfoliate thoroughly and keep the skin moisturised between waxing. (Waxing, like shaving, strips skin of some of its natural moisture.) You may still find, as the new hairs push close to the surface, that you start to itch, and this can last a day or so. During this stage especially, you will need to keep the skin as free as possible of bacteria. Think in advance about when you want to look most smooth and when it wouldn’t be quite so bad to have a little stubble.

A further option is permanent hair removal, through electrolysis, laser, or intense pulse light treatment. If you can afford it, this could well be your best bet. It is expensive, and one treatment session will not destroy all the hair. You’ll end up having spent between R5000 and R10 000, but the treated hairs will be gone for life.

Lastly, don’t worry about what your friends tell you about ‘being a man’. Stripping off his body hair didn’t stop Julius Caesar being a fine military leader – if such is what it is to be a man – and people have been tinkering with the way they look since, well, people were people.

It’s your body and you’re free to try to make it look the way you want. Experiment, but bear in mind keeping it smooth will take a combination of money and effort. You might decide you want to keep making the effort, or, perhaps, after a few months or years, the hair won't seem quite that bad.