system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does Nair hair removal work?
gpt
It eats away at the keratin in the hair (the chemical that does this is potassium thioglycolate). That makes the hair really weak and not able to stand up or hold its structure. Then another chemical (calcium hydroxide) destroys the hair at the root. This makes the hair easy to simply wipe away as it is no longer connected inside your skin as it was. 
Think of it like stripping the bark away from a young tree then allowing for the roots to die. This will make the tree easy to pull up if it doesn't simply fall over first on its own. Then it's just a matter of cleaning away what has fallen.  In this example the tree, but on our skin, the hair.