This nose hair ripper-outer I bought in Tokyo works great

I just returned home from a 5-week stay in Japan with my family. We spent the first 10 days in Kyoto and Koya-san, and the rest of the time we stayed in an apartment in Tokyo, where I worked on Boing Boing, Cool Tools, and Institute for the Future. Despite the high temperatures and humidity, we had a great time. I'll be writing about the trip here in the days to come.

To start things off, here is something I bought at a chain store called Vanguard Village. There is nothing like Vanguard Village in the US as far as I know. It has CDs (Japanese still prefer CDs over MP3s), clothes, makeup, masturbatory aids, manga, books, and tons of other stuff. One shelf was devoted entirely to weird body cleaning products. I bought a few different products to try out. One of them was this nose hair removal kit called Gosso. It cost about $8 and contains enough materials to rip the hair out of six nostrils. (Amazon sells an identical looking kit that can clean out 20 nostrils for $12).

To use it, you heat up waxy pellets in a microwave oven, apply the molten wax to a plastic stick, shove it into your nostril (twisting as you do so), waiting 90 seconds, then yanking the stick out and screaming "SHIT! THAT HURT!"

I have heard removing nostril hairs is a bad idea because they act as filters. But I have 10 times more nostril hair than I did when I was young, and after I used this, I still had hairs farther in the back of my nose. I'm glad to have a nose that doesn't have hairs sprouting from the nostrils.