With perfect, hairless torsos plastered all over social media, it’s not surprise that the manscaping trend is growing with many of us turning to online forums to find out how to shave your chest.

Although shaving isn’t the best long-term solution for a hair free chest, it does provide instant results that are pain-free. The results from other hair removal methods such as waxing can give you a hair-free chest for longer but the pain can bring most men to tears!

Shaving your chest is great for manscaping before a date or exposing those abs you’ve done a million crunches to get before a holiday. However, some people believe that shaving your chest can make your hair grow back thicker so shaving isn’t always best if you’re looking for a hair-free chest in the long term.

Many of these ‘occasion-shavers’ believe that shaving your chest is easy and end up with a hair-free chest, which is covered is a rash and unsightly bumps. You need to know how to shave your chest correctly.

Shaving your chest isn’t particularly hard when you know how to shave it!

How To Shave Your Chest

See our guide on the best way to shave your chest and how to keep shaving rashes and bumps to a minimum:

1. Prepare For The Shave

Never shave without trimming long hairs! We’d like to think that this goes without saying but we know that too many of us miss out on this key step.

Razors aren’t designed for cutting long hairs. If you were to ever try shaving long chest hairs then you will notice a pulling discomfort sensation as the razor pulls on the hairs as opposed to cutting them.

So, before you go ahead and decide to start shaving your chest, it’s important to trim your chest hair with a trimmer.

There is no length too short to trim your hairs too. You could even trim your chest hair on the lowest setting and forget about shaving your chest completely as some trimmers allow for a really close cut.

We recommend the Philips Series 7000 trimmer which you can pick up from Amazon for less than £50.The trimmer is a great grooming essential, it has a built in vacuum which helps to keep mess to a minimum.

2. Freshen Up

Before you pick up a razor and ‘go for it’, it’s important that you make sure you shower before any type of shaving. This step is really important for blemish & irritation free skin following a shave.

The oil our skin produces and dirt on our skin can enter the pores of the skin and result in acne/skin blemishes. The action of shaving on ‘dirty’ skin can clog pores with the skins oil and dirt, resulting in spots or worse, an infection. Therefore, it’s really important to ensure that your skin is clean.

Shaving can put your skin through quite a lot of ‘stress’. Therefore, we don’t recommend in this instance to use harsh face washes or scrubs as this can add more stress to the skin in a process which isn’t that great for skin.

To clean your skin without exposing it to too much stress, we recommend a sensitive shower gel like NIVEA MEN Sensitive Shower Gel 250ml from Boots for £1.

Some people like to shave their chest in the shower and we’re firm supporters of this. Not only does the steam help to reduce spots but it’s also a mess-free way to shave your chest.

3. Go For It

Now that you’ve prepared the hairs to be shaved off and prepared the skin to minimise infection, you’re ready to shave your chest.

It’s important to use a brand new, clean razor. Every time you shave with a razor, the blades become blunter resulting in a worse shave. A shave that can result in cuts, irritated skin and spots if you’re not careful. Hence why we recommend using a new razor for shaving your chest.

We recommend shaving in the direction of the grain (the way the hair grows) as opposed to against it, which is typically recommended when it comes to shaving your face. This may result in a less-close shave but will reduce the risk of ingrowing hairs and spots. Think about how many more hairs are on your chest compared to your face, the risk of ingrowing hairs will be much higher due to the greater amount of hairs on the chest. Hence why we want to go with the grain of the hair and lower the risk.

When picking a razor to shave your chest with, we recommend the Gillette Fusion5 Proglide Flexball Razor. The razor handle contains flex-ball technology which allows the razor to pivot in multiple directions for maximum contact so there’s fewer missed hairs. Also, the chest has multiple different angles which the proglide can contour over.

Now you’re done, you’ve figured out how to shave your chest, whilst reducing irritation and ingrowing hairs.