Many models in which the object under study loses all its mass have appeared in the literature. This can be found from evaporating stars to incipient black holes, all the way to evaporating black holes. In this paper we try a semiclassical study of these evaporating models centred on the evaporating event itself. We analyse their common properties, behaviours and possibilities. Specifically, we pay special attention to the evaporating models as a means of avoiding singularities during the collapse. In the case of any pre-existing non-spacelike curvature singularity, we show that these models tend to evaporate it. Finally, we introduce a new class of evaporating black holes.