In the program "Historically yours" on Europe 1 this Wednesday, the journalist David Castello-Lopes returns to the origin of the electric epilator, a machine invented by an Israeli to fight the invasion of hair on the human body.

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Historically yours

, David Castello-Lopes looks back on the origins of an object or a concept.

This Wednesday, he looks at the electric epilator, this machine invented by an Israeli to fight the invasion of hair on the human body.

But it is also, for 

David Castello-Lopes, the symbol of the last of the pains that one inflicts on oneself voluntarily, often with the aim of seducing: hair removal.

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Hair removal, the pain that we inflict ... 

I am happy enough to live in our time because we have nevertheless mastered the pain quite well: when we give birth we have an epidural, when we have kidney stones there is general anesthesia.

No one anymore forces us to go to war if we don't want to, so exit the bayonet blows in the eyes ... But there is still a pain, which we inflict on ourselves in addition, that of hair removal. 

... to hit on

We wax because we imagine (and not necessarily wrongly) that the majority of people prefer, from an erotic point of view, low hairiness.

So we wax, we cry, we cry, we are sad ... But we say to ourselves that it is worth it because we are going to sin!

But of course, not all people are equal when it comes to hair removal.

Already, because there is a great unfair genetic diversity in the degree of hairiness, but above all because the poor cannot wax like the rich.

When you are rich, you entrust your hair to a qualified person who plucks you under a soft light with a disc that plays sounds of the forest.

But when you are poor, you have to wax on your own.

And one of the ways to epilate on your own is the electric epilator.

A strange machine that works according to a simple principle: metal blades or springs trap the hair then pull on it. 

An Israeli invention

But then who invented such a machine?

To find out I went to Israel!

Most journalists go to the region to interview Hamas, I go there to interview the inventor of the electric epilator.

Yair Dar is over 70 years old now and he is visually striking because he has an eye patch like Albator or Moshe Dayan ... He's the one behind the Epilady, the first epilator brand. 

Yair Dar was an engineer, but also an inventor.

He's the kind of guy who thinks about things all day long to make people's lives better.

For 10 years, he made 15 different prototypes, some of which really looked like construction milling machines.

He tests them on his own legs before coming up with a model that works.

A quest that culminated in 1986 with the marketing of the first electric epilator, the Epilady.