US 6,669,704 B2Granted

Hand-held epilating device

AssigneeMatsushita Electric Works, Ltd.

InventorsTomoyuki Inoue, Hidekazu Sueyoshi, Jyuzaemon Iwasaki, Kotaro Yanagi

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Abstract

An epilating device has a rotary cylinder carrying a plurality of pinching row units arranged around the cylinder. An actuator bar is connected to movable blades in each row unit and is caused by a driven mechanism to move the movable blades towards the adjacent blades for pinching body hairs therebetween and plucking the hairs as the cylinder rotates. After the actuator bar is released from the driven mechanism, the bar is urged by a return spring to move the blades away from the adjacent blade to be ready for subsequent hair pinching. All the actuator bars spaced circumferentially around the cylinder and provided respectively for the row units are coupled commonly to the one return spring so that the epilating device can have an increased number of the row units around the cylinder only at a minimum number of the springs.

Claims21

Dependent claims

A hand-held epilating device comprising:

a housing to be grasped by a hand of a user;
a rotary cylinder mounted to said housing and having a longitudinal axis, said rotary cylinder carrying a plurality of pinching row units circumferentially spaced about said longitudinal axis, each of said pinching row units comprising at least one set of blades arranged along said longitudinal axis,
a plurality of actuator bars being arranged circumferentially about said longitudinal axis and associated with said pinching row units, respectively, each of said actuator bars extending through said rotary cylinder and being driven to shift along said longitudinal axis to move at least one of the blades in each pinching row unit against and away from an adjacent blade catching and pinching hairs therebetween;
a drive mechanism for driving said actuator bars to reciprocate along said longitudinal axis while rotating the rotary cylinder about the longitudinal axis for pinching the hairs between the adjacent blades and plucking the hairs from the user's skin, wherein
all the circumferentially spaced actuator bars are coupled commonly to a single return spring so as to be urged thereby in a direction of disengaging the blade from the adjacent blade.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.