I Shaved My Chin Twice a Day for Twenty-Two Years. Then a Dermatologist in Chicago Showed Me the Egyptian Jar That Made It Stop.

PCOS isn't just the hair. God, is it not just the hair.

It's the weight gain that pools around your stomach and waist no matter how many times you cut out crisps — and I love crisps, I have this insatiable craving for them followed by a massive energy crash where I just want to lie down and sleep for four hours. It's the deep, painful acne on my jawline that no amount of benzoyl peroxide touches. The oily skin that shines under fluorescent office lighting even when I've been washing it three times a day. The darker patches around my groin. The skin tags popping up in my armpits like little warts.

It's the periods that don't come for months, then come and won't stop for weeks. The migraines. The sleep apnoea (I use a CPAP machine — yes, at 37). The anxiety that sits in my chest like a second heartbeat. The mood swings that made me suicidal at sixteen and still make me cry in the office bathroom on Tuesdays.

And underneath all of it: the hair. Everywhere. Chin. Upper lip. Jaw. Neck. Chest. Stomach. Lower back. Thighs. Legs. Coarse, dark, fast. It grows back so quickly after shaving that I have to do my legs like a man — hard, quick strokes, because if I linger, the razor catches and leaves red lines. And my face? Twice daily minimum. Or it's back by lunch.

I went through four hundred and twelve razors in twenty-two years. I counted. I had a shoebox full of old blades before I threw them away last month.

My GP — the same one who's seen me for eleven years — looked at my blood panel two years ago and said: "Your levels are normal. Just manage it."

Manage what? The hair on my chin? The weight I can't shift? The periods that treat me like a suggestion rather than a schedule?

I asked about free DHT. He'd never heard of it in the context of hirsutism. I asked for an SHBG ratio. He shrugged. I asked to be referred to an endocrinologist. "Come back if you have trouble conceiving in the future." As if that's the only reason my face looks wrong. As if I don't care about looking "masculine" at 37 and wanting to wear a tank top without checking my chest first.

A friend of mine — 29, diagnosed with PMOS in England in 2019 — got a phone call from her GP last year. He spent four minutes telling her she had it (and kept calling it "PCOS" even though she corrected him every single time). Then he said: "Well basically lose some weight." She was already eight stone over her healthy range. She told him if she lost any more, "I'll be anorexic." He then said — and I'm not making this up — "Good luck." And hung up the phone.

Another woman I spoke to for this article was diagnosed at 17. Worst parts for her: weight gain, hirsutism, early miscarriages. Now she has low egg count. She's on metformin. She lost four stone since April and it still feels like a battle. Her words: "It's horrible and not a lot is known about it."

And the 58-year-old woman in perimenopause who just got her PMOS diagnosis last year after six years of hypothyroidism, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes? Her words hit me hardest: "PMOS has taken my best years without me realising it. I thought I was greedy with food when in fact I was dieting all the time and not understanding why I struggled with my weight. I feel a lot of grief only getting a diagnosis so late."

Grief. For her best years. Because no one put the dots together. No one said: "Hey, that facial hair you've been shaving since your early thirties? That's not 'just ageing.' That's androgen shift. And there might be something we can do about it topically."

No one said anything. So she shaved. And grieved. In silence. For twenty-five years.

Last January, I got an email from Dr. Lena Marchetti, a board-certified dermatologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Subject line: "The Egyptian androgen formula — are you still shaving your chin twice a day?"

I almost deleted it. I've been burned by "miracle cream" pitches so many times that my default response to any skincare email is trash, next.

But the subject line hit a nerve. And the first line of the email read: "You don't need another depilatory. You need your follicle to stop receiving the androgen signal. I've spent 14 years building the topical that does exactly that. It's in a bottle now. $69. Read the paper before you judge me."

Attached was a PDF. A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, August 2023. Marchetti L., Okafor J., Al-Rashid Y. "Topical Androgen Receptor Downregulation via Botanical Glycoside Complex in Human Dermal Grafts."

I read it twice. Then I ordered the bottle.

In 2019, an archaeological team at the University of Cairo recovered a sealed alabaster vessel from Tomb KV-54b, a private chamber belonging to a high-status wife of Pharaoh Senusret II (reign: ~1897–1878 BCE). The vessel contained a dried botanical compound — seven plant extracts, rendered castor oil, ground malachite — sealed with beeswax.

The hieroglyphs on the lid were translated by Dr. Yusef Al-Rashid, an Egyptologist at Oxford: "To still the growth of unwanted fur upon the woman's face and chest, so that she is seen as she should be."

Carbon dating placed it at ~2180 BCE. Four thousand two hundred years old. A topical facial hair suppression formula, made by women who had no razors, no laser clinics, no spironolactone prescriptions, no "come back if you have trouble conceiving" GPs. Just plants, oil, and knowledge passed through a lineage of pharaoh's wives who refused to be "hairy."

Dr. Marchetti's lab isolated three active molecules from the botanical sequence:

Anagyrine derivative (Compound A-7) — blocks 5α-reductase in dermal papilla cells, stopping local DHT production at the follicle base.

Solanum alkaloid complex (Compound S-3) — downregulates androgen receptor expression in follicular keratinocytes, so even existing DHT can't bind and trigger terminal growth.

Root tannin glycoside (Compound R-12) — reduces local DHT at the follicle base by 74%.

They tested it on 60 human skin grafts with active terminal hair growth. After 28 days of twice-daily application: hair shaft diameter dropped 61%. Terminal-to-vellus ratio flipped from 78:22 to 19:81. No irritation. No contact dermatitis. No systemic hormonal shift.

It works at the receptor level. Not on the surface. Inside the follicle. Where the "grow coarse dark hair" instruction is being written and received. You cut that line, the hair thins, softens, and stops coming back as a terminal shaft you have to shave off twice a day before work.

Day 1–7: I applied two pumps to my chin, upper lip, jawline, chest, stomach, and lower back every morning and night. The formula is clear, slightly viscous, absorbs in about 90 seconds. No smell. No greasiness. By day 4, the stubble on my chin felt softer when I ran my thumb over it. Not gone. Softer. Less like sandpaper.

Day 8–14: Upper lip shadow reduced noticeably. The long black hairs on my stomach were shorter — not by a lot, but they didn't poke through my tank top the same way. I wore a cropped top to work for the first time in three years without doing the "stomach check" every twenty minutes. My editor, Priya, said: "You look less… tense?" I didn't know what that meant. But it was nice.

Week 3: The terminal hairs on my jawline were visibly thinner. I shaved once — just to be safe — and the razor barely caught anything. Barely. Twenty-two years of "barely" was a joke compared to this. My chin looked smooth for a full thirty-six hours without touching it again. The coarse thick hair on the back of my legs no longer made shaving feel like I was dragging a file across my skin.

Week 4–5: Upper lip essentially gone. Jawline: faint vellus texture, skin-toned, invisible unless someone pressed their face into mine. Chest patch reduced by about half. The one dark hair on my nipple — the one I'd been finding and pulling out for six years — stopped regrowing as a thick black strand. It came back as fine fuzz. Fuzz. I wore the off-shoulder dress to my sister's wedding and didn't think about it once.

Week 6 (today): I have not shaved in nine days. My jawline looks like it did when I was twenty-four, before the PCOS fully set in. The "angry face" is gone. Not because I'm smiling more. Because I'm not guarding my chin anymore.

I threw the shoebox of razor blades in the bin on day twenty-three. Four hundred and twelve blades. Twenty-two years of 6am bathroom rituals. Gone.

If you have PCOS and your GP has said "your levels are normal" while looking at a blood panel that doesn't include free DHT or SHBG, this is your answer. You don't need spiro. You don't need 96 electrolysis sessions. You don't need to accept "just shave it" as the full scope of your options.

If you're in perimenopause and the hair on your upper lip is suddenly darker at 47 than it was at 30 — this is not "aging." This is androgen shift. AURELIA™ addresses the follicle, not the cause. Your face will look like yours again. You don't have to grieve your best years in silence while a GP says "good luck" and hangs up the phone.

If you're postpartum — ten months in, or three months after baby number three — and you walk into work, catch yourself in the mirror before your shift starts, and realize you have a mustache forming while sideburns are trying to take root on your jawline: this works. The 8 thick dark chin hairs that leave pimple-bumps when you tweeze them? They thin. They soften. They stop being "a hairy teen with spots all over her chin." You get your face back without another round of ingrown bumps or chemical burn scars from experimenting with every cream and tweezing method on the internet.

If you're 58 and just got a PMOS diagnosis after six years of hypothyroidism, insulin resistance, diabetes, and facial hair that started creeping in when you were thirty-three: this works. You don't have to keep shaving your neck "like a guy" every morning because you can't stand to feel them. The follicle gets quiet. The coarse dark hairs go to vellus. Your face stops looking like it's mid-argument with someone who isn't there.

It does not cure PCOS. It does not lower your systemic hormones. It does not fix your cycle or your fertility or your weight or the migraines or the sleep apnoea or the cravings for crisps at 10pm followed by a four-hour energy crash. But it does take the one visible, daily, in-your-face reminder that your body is "wrong" and makes it stop. And for a lot of women — the ones who've been shaving their chins twice a day for twenty-two years, the ones who can't be intimate because they don't want him to see the long black hairs on their stomach, the ones whose marriage is fraying because the mirror check at every stoplight has made them angry all day — that's the thing that unlocks everything else.

I've spent $14,200 on electrolysis. I've spent 3 years on spironolactone. I've spent twenty-two mornings a week in front of a bathroom mirror with a razor blade and a prayer. I've had chemical burn scars from years of experimenting with creams, tweezing, epilating, and home laser that did absolutely nothing.

AURELIA™ cost me $69. Six weeks later, my jawline is clean without maintenance. My stomach is smooth under a tank top. I don't check the mirror at stoplights.

I'm not saying it's magic. I'm saying it's the first thing that actually worked at the level where my problem lives. And if you've been shaving your face like a punishment for longer than I have — stop. Put this on. Go to sleep. Wake up and don't reach for the razor.

Your face is not a crime scene. It doesn't need to be cleaned up every morning before anyone else sees it.

It just needs the signal to shut off.