Many estheticians hesitate to rip hair from moles, but the fear that doing so would turn a mole cancerous is completely unfounded.

“You can do anything you want to a mole, pretty much,” said Dr. Bernard Cohen, interim chair of dermatology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “If you want to pluck, shave, wax or use electrolysis on a mole, there’s no evidence that this will cause a melanoma, or any other kind of skin cancer.” The only caution about moles, he added, is that it’s not a good idea to irradiate them, which means being sure to put sunscreens on moles as well as the rest of your skin.

Perhaps the fear that plucking hairs from moles is linked to cancer stems from the fact that every once in a while, “a mole may turn malignant by itself, and then you might blame what was done to it,” said Dr. Amal Kurban, a professor of dermatology at the Boston University School of Medicine. But basically, he said, “it’s very simple – removing hair from a mole usually doesn’t disrupt the cells.”

Plucking hair from a mole can lead to inflammation and perhaps infection, but that’s all.