Everything You Need to Know About Leg Veins—and How to Make Them Vanish

A blue leaf background with visible veins with a black woman's legs in red shoes wearing a red dress and a white woman's legs wearing olive green heels and matching dress.

Every summer, as temperatures and hemlines rise, our legs face public exposure and, often, our private scrutiny. One focus of that thorough examination, particularly as women age, are leg veins. To be clear, this is not a new fixation. Women have never not had visible leg veins (in the Ebers Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical text dating to 1550 BC, they’re referred to as “serpentine windings”) and we’ve never not subjected ourselves to various, sometimes grisly, treatments to try to get rid of them. From surgical removal to phlebectomy (where a doctor makes an incision and then uses a hooked tool to pull out a vein, formerly without anesthesia) to iron or iodine injections, to “stripping” procedures using steel wires, vein treatments have historically come with a lot of pain and little gain.

Thanks in large part to our modern (read, increasingly sedentary) lifestyles, leg veins remain a major issue, but how we address them has, thankfully, evolved dramatically. Here’s everything you need to know about treating visible leg veins, straight from the professionals.